this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Yep, to add on as well as summarized this... Linux has historically had a design methodology of "everything is a file". If your not familear with the implications of this, it means your command line tools just kind of work with most things, and everything is easy to find.
For instance, there's no "registry / regedit" on Linux... There's just a folder with a config file that the application stores settings in. There's no control panel application to modify your network settings... Just a text file on your OS. Your system logs and startup tasks were also (you guessed it) sinole filea on the system. Sure there might be GUI apps to make these things easier for users, but under the hood it reads and writes a file.
This idea goes further than you might assume. Your hard drive is a file on the file system (a special file called a block device). You can do something like "mount /dev/sda1 /home/myuser/some_folder" to "attach" the drive to a folder on the system, but that special block device (dev/sda1 in this case) can be read and written to byte by byte if you want with low level tools like dd.
Even an audio card output can show as a file in dev (this is less the case now with pipewire and pulse), but you used to be able to just echo a raw audio file (like a wav file) and redirect the output to your audio device "file" and it would play out your speaker.
Systemd flipped this all around, and now instead of just changing files, you have to use applications to specify changes to your system. Want to stop something from starting? Well, it used to be that you just move it out of the init directory, but now you have to know to "systemctl disable something.service", or to view logs " journalctl -idk something.service" I dont even remember the flags for specifying a service, so I have to look it up, where it used to just be looking at a file (and maybe use grep to search for something specific)
That is still the case, nothing stops you from manually moving a file and its dependencies into or out of
/etc/systemd/system/not true, SystemD still uses files for this very reason....
and what is the last time you used the text version of a syslog.8.xz file?
you are basically complaining that you need to learn how your system works... before you can use it. and there is nothing preventing you from making your own distro that doesn't uses SystemD, or using rSyslog instead of systemd-journal for logging.
incidentally, to just view the logs its
journalctl -xef(see https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/journalctl.1.html for what that means) it will be like the syslog you know.want to see the status of a daemon :
systemctl statuswant it for the systemsystemctl statuswant to see the logs of only a specific daemonjournalctl -xefu. this all, means that its easier to find the logs for diffrent services since there not scattered somewhere in the /var/log dir... (is it in the syslog, does it have its own log file, is it in the kernel log)...You are free to setup your system in whatever way you like... but whining about that something works differently is "Microsoft mentality"... lets leave that with them.
Enable and disable just create symlinks of the "just changing files" files in your example. It tells you this every time you install something that enables a service.
Want to do it manually? ln -s (or rm the link to "disable" it).
Want it to happen later in the init sequence? Put the link in a different .target directory.
All "systemctl enable" does is put the symlink in the target directory that's specified in the Install section of the unit file.
As for "specifying a service"... Everything is a unit file (yes, file), journalctl -u just means "only show me logs for this unit".
There's no flag for "specifying a service", you just type in the service name. If there's any ambiguity (eg. unit.service and unit.socket), you type the service name followed by .service
A flag you might find useful is -g, which means "grep for this string". You can combine this with -u to narrow it down.
Not the really the point of your post but I personally tend to use journalctl -fu something.service. That brings you to the end of the logs for that unit and I get to smile about flipping off systemd.