[systemd-devel] Question on Before=

[Steve Dickson]

On 2/2/19 4:07 PM, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> On Sat, 2019-02-02 at 15:03 -0500, Steve Dickson wrote:
>>>   Have you enabled a.service?
>>>
>> No... I did not think I had to... I figured 
>> when b.service was started, a.service would be 
>> run regardless of being enabled or disabled.
>>
>> Is that not the case?
> 
> So you just have the file for a.service lying somewhere on disk, but
> haven't enabled it and no other unit references it? 
That is true... 

> That won't do anything - systemd does not read through all files on disk to see if
> there'd be something inside the file which declares that it should
> actually be started. Units need to have something else referencing them
> for systemd to "see" them at all. "enable" does this by creating a link
> from the units/targets referenced in the [Install] section to the file
> in question (by creating a symlink in 
> /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/ for example).
Basically enabling the service... fair enough... 

steved.