Show all peers on the bus, by their service names. By default, shows both unique and well-known names, but this may be changed with the --unique and --acquired switches. This is the default operation if no command is specified.

Show process information and credentials of a bus service (if one is specified by its unique or well-known name), a process (if one is specified by its numeric PID), or the owner of the bus (if no parameter is specified).

Dump messages being exchanged. If SERVICE is specified, show messages to or from this peer, identified by its well-known or unique name. Otherwise, show all messages on the bus. Use Ctrl+C to terminate the dump.

Similar to monitor but writes the output in pcapng format (for details, see PCAP Next Generation (pcapng) Capture File Format). Make sure to redirect standard output to a file or pipe. Tools like wireshark(1) may be used to dissect and view the resulting files.

Shows an object tree of one or more services. If SERVICE is specified, show object tree of the specified services only. Otherwise, show all object trees of all services on the bus that acquired at least one well-known name.

Show interfaces, methods, properties and signals of the specified object (identified by its path) on the specified service. If the interface argument is passed, the output is limited to members of the specified interface.

Invoke a method and show the response. Takes a service name, object path, interface name and method name. If parameters shall be passed to the method call, a signature string is required, followed by the arguments, individually formatted as strings. For details on the formatting used, see below. To suppress output of the returned data, use the --quiet option.

Emit a signal. Takes an object path, interface name and method name. If parameters shall be passed, a signature string is required, followed by the arguments, individually formatted as strings. For details on the formatting used, see below. To specify the destination of the signal, use the --destination= option.

Retrieve the current value of one or more object properties. Takes a service name, object path, interface name and property name. Multiple properties may be specified at once, in which case their values will be shown one after the other, separated by newlines. The output is, by default, in terse format. Use --verbose for a more elaborate output format.

Set the current value of an object property. Takes a service name, object path, interface name, property name, property signature, followed by a list of parameters formatted as strings.

Show command syntax help.

Connect to the bus specified by ADDRESS instead of using suitable defaults for either the system or user bus (see --system and --user options).

When showing the list of peers, show a column containing the names of containers they belong to. See systemd-machined.service(8).

When showing the list of peers, show only "unique" names (of the form ":number.number").

The opposite of --unique — only "well-known" names will be shown.

When showing the list of peers, show only peers which have actually not been activated yet, but may be started automatically if accessed.

When showing messages being exchanged, show only the subset matching MATCH. See sd_bus_add_match(3).

When used with the capture command, specifies the maximum bus message size to capture ("snaplen"). Defaults to 4096 bytes.

When used with the tree command, shows a flat list of object paths instead of a tree.

When used with the call command, suppresses display of the response message payload. Note that even if this option is specified, errors returned will still be printed and the tool will indicate success or failure with the process exit code.

When used with the call or get-property command, shows output in a more verbose format.

When used with the introspect call, dump the XML description received from the D-Bus org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable.Introspect call instead of the normal output.

When used with the call or get-property command, shows output formatted as JSON. Expects one of "short" (for the shortest possible output without any redundant whitespace or line breaks) or "pretty" (for a pretty version of the same, with indentation and line breaks). Note that transformation from D-Bus marshalling to JSON is done in a loss-less way, which means type information is embedded into the JSON object tree.

Equivalent to --json=pretty when invoked interactively from a terminal. Otherwise equivalent to --json=short, in particular when the output is piped to some other program.

When used with the call command, specifies whether busctl shall wait for completion of the method call, output the returned method response data, and return success or failure via the process exit code. If this is set to "no", the method call will be issued but no response is expected, the tool terminates immediately, and thus no response can be shown, and no success or failure is returned via the exit code. To only suppress output of the reply message payload, use --quiet above. Defaults to "yes".

When used with the call or emit command, specifies whether the method call should implicitly activate the called service, should it not be running yet but is configured to be auto-started. Defaults to "yes".

When used with the call command, specifies whether the services may enforce interactive authorization while executing the operation, if the security policy is configured for this. Defaults to "yes".

When used with the call command, specifies the maximum time to wait for method call completion. If no time unit is specified, assumes seconds. The usual other units are understood, too (ms, us, s, min, h, d, w, month, y). Note that this timeout does not apply if --expect-reply=no is used, as the tool does not wait for any reply message then. When not specified or when set to 0, the default of "25s" is assumed.

Controls whether credential data reported by list or status shall be augmented with data from /proc/. When this is turned on, the data shown is possibly inconsistent, as the data read from /proc/ might be more recent than the rest of the credential information. Defaults to "yes".

Controls whether to wait for the specified AF_UNIX bus socket to appear in the file system before connecting to it. Defaults to off. When enabled, the tool will watch the file system until the socket is created and then connect to it.

Takes a service name. When used with the emit command, a signal is emitted to the specified service.

Talk to the service manager of the calling user, rather than the service manager of the system.

Talk to the service manager of the system. This is the implied default.

Execute the operation remotely. Specify a hostname, or a username and hostname separated by "@", to connect to. The hostname may optionally be suffixed by a port ssh is listening on, separated by ":", and then a container name, separated by "/", which connects directly to a specific container on the specified host. This will use SSH to talk to the remote machine manager instance. Container names may be enumerated with machinectl -H HOST. Put IPv6 addresses in brackets.

Execute operation on a local container. Specify a container name to connect to, optionally prefixed by a user name to connect as and a separating "@" character. If the special string ".host" is used in place of the container name, a connection to the local system is made (which is useful to connect to a specific user's user bus: "--user --machine=lennart@.host"). If the "@" syntax is not used, the connection is made as root user. If the "@" syntax is used either the left hand side or the right hand side may be omitted (but not both) in which case the local user name and ".host" are implied.

Do not ellipsize the output in list command.

Do not pipe output into a pager.

Do not print the legend, i.e. column headers and the footer with hints.

Print a short help text and exit.

Print a short version string and exit.