Tutorial

What is systemd?

Published on December 22, 2020
What is systemd?

Many Linux distributions use systemd to manage system settings and services. systemd organizes tasks into components called units, and groups of units into targets, that can be used to create dependencies on other system services and resources.

systemd can start units and targets automatically at boot time, or when requested by a user or another systemd target when a server is already running.

The systemctl command is used to interact with processes that are controlled by systemd. It can examine the status of units and targets, as well as start, stop, and reconfigure them.

To learn more about managing services with systemd and defining and using systemd unit files, visit:

Finally, to learn how to interact with systemd logs using the journalctl command, visit this tutorial, How To Use Journalctl to View and Manipulate Systemd Logs, which explains how systemd collects logs from units and displays them in a centralized location and unified format.

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