[systemd-devel] Return codes of systemctl (status)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Do, 16.08.18 12:18, Dave Reisner (d at falconindy.com) wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 01:27:12PM +0200, Cecil Westerhof wrote:
> > The man page of systemctl says:
> >     On success, 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise.
> > 
> > When I do a systemctl status on a service that is not running I get a 3.
> > What other values can be returned and where do I find those?
> 
> I believe exit codes are meant to conform to LSB specs:
> 
> http://refspecs.linuxbase.org/LSB_3.0.0/LSB-PDA/LSB-PDA/iniscrptact.html
> 
> In general, I'd suggest not depending on the specific values, but
> instead using a more appropriate verb. For example, if you want to
> know that a service is running, is 'systemctl is-active'.

This is correct. This is supposed to match LSB status exit codes, but
the mapping is a bit skewed due to different semantics.

In general we return 0 on success, non-zero otherwise, but "systemctl
status" (and a few verbs like it) do this differently to match LSB. We
should probably document that better. I filed a bug requesting this
now, so that we keep track of this.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/10056

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat