line.
Note that unit glob patterns expand to names of units currently in memory. Units which are not active and are not in a failed state usually are not in memory, and will not be matched by any pattern. In addition,
in case of instantiated units, systemd is often unaware of the instance name until the instance has been started. Therefore, using glob patterns with start has limited usefulness. Also, secondary alias names of
units are not considered.
Option --all may be used to also operate on inactive units which are referenced by other loaded units. Note that this is not the same as operating on "all" possible units, because as the previous paragraph
describes, such a list is ill-defined. Nevertheless, systemctl start --all GLOB may be useful if all the units that should match the pattern are pulled in by some target which is known to be loaded.
stop PATTERN...
Stop (deactivate) one or more units specified on the command line.
This command will fail if the unit does not exist or if stopping of the unit is prohibited (see RefuseManualStop= in systemd.unit(5)). It will not fail if any of the commands configured to stop the unit
(ExecStop=, etc.) fail, because the manager will still forcibly terminate the unit.
reload PATTERN...
Asks all units listed on the command line to reload their configuration. Note that this will reload the service-specific configuration, not the unit configuration file of systemd. If you want systemd to reload the
configuration file of a unit, use the daemon-reload command. In other words: for the example case of Apache, this will reload Apache's httpd.conf in the web server, not the apache.service systemd unit file.
This command should not be confused with the daemon-reload command.
restart PATTERN...
Stop and then start one or more units specified on the command line. If the units are not running yet, they will be started.
Note that restarting a unit with this command does not necessarily flush out all of the unit's resources before it is started again. For example, the per-service file descriptor storage facility (see
FileDescriptorStoreMax= in systemd.service(5)) will remain intact as long as the unit has a job pending, and is only cleared when the unit is fully stopped and no jobs are pending anymore. If it is intended that
the file descriptor store is flushed out, too, during a restart operation an explicit systemctl stop command followed by systemctl start should be issued.
try-restart PATTERN...
Stop and then start one or more units specified on the command line if the units are running. This does nothing if units are not running.
reload-or-restart PATTERN...
Reload one or more units if they support it. If not, stop and then start them instead. If the units are not running yet, they will be started.
try-reload-or-restart PATTERN...
Reload one or more units if they support it. If not, stop and then start them instead. This does nothing if the units are not running.
isolate UNIT
Start the unit specified on the command line and its dependencies and stop all others, unless they have IgnoreOnIsolate=yes (see systemd.unit(5)). If a unit name with no extension is given, an extension of
".target" will be assumed.
This command is dangerous, since it will immediately stop processes that are not enabled in the new target, possibly including the graphical environment or terminal you are currently using.
Note that this operation is allowed only on units where AllowIsolate= is enabled. See systemd.unit(5) for details.
kill PATTERN...
Send a signal to one or more processes of the unit. Use --kill-whom= to select which process to kill. Use --signal= to select the signal to send.
clean