More broken “documentation”: upstart

Question

I really miss the graphical "Services" tool from older versions of Ubuntu, but I imagine it had to go because it was too useful and might scare Aunt Millie or something :^/ I always have terminals open anyway, so I use (because I have to now, I guess) service --status-all to see what services are running. This would be ok except that the command produces output like the following:

[ + ] winbind [ ? ] wpa-ifupdown [ - ] x11-common

I'm guessing that those symbols mean something like listening, blocked, or stopped, but which is which? More importantly, why doesn't the man page say?

Answer 1

To provide a shallow and unsatisfactory answer your first question:

• The command service --status-all literally runs service $SERVICE status for each service that supports the status command. It draws a [ + ] or [ - ] depending on whether the exit status was zero or nonzero, respectively.
• The [ ? ] is drawn for services that do not support the service command. Support for this command is determined by grepping the "Usage" information that is printed when service $SERVICE is run.

As you might have anticipated, I learned this by reading the source code.

To address the real issue – the lack of documentation – I suggest filing a polite bug report about the manpage on Launchpad. ubuntu-bug sysvinit-utils should get you started.

Answer 2

services-admin was removed from the default installation some releases ago due to the fact that it was unable to handle Upstart jobs.

In 10.10, a utility to manage services has returned: jobs-admin will be able to control and configure both Upstart and System V jobs/services. If you'd like to give this a try now, check out the jobs-admin/jobservice PPA.

As for the symbols in your question, I believe + is running/enabled, ? is configured to start but may not be currently running (run-once, maybe), and - is likely disabled or not running.

Disclaimer: I am the developer of jobs-admin and jobservice and worked on it as a summer of code project for Ubuntu. It is not available on a default installation, but I'd like to work towards that for 11.04.