service - run a System V init script

The easiest way to start and stop services such as sendmail or the Apache Web server from the command line is to use the service command. service runs a System V init script in as predictable environment as possible, removing most environment variables and with current working directory set to /.

service --status-all list all services running 

To discover the status of a service, type service sendmail status. This should output something similar to:

sendmail (pid 4660 4652) is running...

If you want to shutdown a running sendmail, you can type service sendmail stop. To start it again, use service sendmail start. To stop and restart sendmail, use service sendmail restart.

If you can't stop a running or rogue service using the service command then you may need to resort to the kill and killall commands.

service --status-all

service --help | -h | --version

The SCRIPT parameter specifies a System V init script, located in /etc/init.d/SCRIPT. The supported values of COMMAND depend on the invoked script, service passes COMMAND and OPTIONS it to the init script unmodified. All scripts should support at least the start and stop commands. As a special case, if COMMAND is --full-restart, the script is run twice, first with the stop command, then with the start command.

service --status-all runs all init scripts, in alphabetical order, with the status command.

Environment

LANG, TERM The only environment variables passed to the init scripts.

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Restarting an unresponsive Web server

Let's look at an example of how to use these commands to solve a real-life problem. If you find that your Web server has stopped responding and needs to be restarted, first try the service command. The start/stop script for your Web server should be able to get it running again. For Apache on CentOS 5 we would type:

service httpd restart

If that fails, next try the killall command to eliminate the old instance of the Web server:

killall -9 httpd

Run ps to check that all the Apache services died:

ps aux | grep httpd

If there are any strays, kill them off individually with the kill command. Finally, restart the Web server with:

service httpd start

A friend of mine recently had problem with the fetchmail process. Fetchmail is a program that fetches mail from external mail servers and pulls them down onto the local server. One morning he discovered that his system was running slowly. A quick use of the top command revealed that the fetchmail process was using 99% of the system memory. He noted the fetchmail process's PID, then killed the process and restarted it using the service command. The memory was freed and the system sprang back to life.

service(8) run System V init script - Linux man page

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Last modified: March 12, 2019