Output from systemctl start/restart/stop

Question

I want to see output from my systemctl commands. For example:

systemctl restart systemd-networkd  

would display the output of

systemctl status systemd-networkd. 

I know that I could write a script that always puts the commands sequentially but I am hoping there is something like

systemctl --verbose restart ....

that didn't make it into the man page.

Answer 1

To my knowledge, there is no such thing. That being said, you can go ahead and "make you own":

We're going to edit out bashrc file to add this as a an alias command

echo "startstat(){ systemctl start \$*; systemctl status \$* }" >> ~/.bashrc

Note that this will only work for bash sessions and for the user you're running it for, so don't run this inside stuff that doesn't run bashrc before starting.

You can then start services and immediately get the status by running

startstat [arguments to pass to BOTH systemctl start AND systemctl status]

Sample usage:

startstat systemd-networkd 

If you want to wait a little bit before checking the status, you can always add a sleep between:

Just nano ~/.bashrc, scroll to the bottom (or if you added things, whichever line it's at), and just add sleep [seconds]; between systemctl start \$*; and systemctl status \$*;

If you want the status to be run after the start is finished, you can put a singular & sign with a space in front of it between the \$* and the ; to fork it off into background.