loginctl — Control the systemd login manager
loginctl [OPTIONS...] {COMMAND} [NAME...]
loginctl may be used to introspect and control the state of the systemd(1) login manager systemd-logind.service(8).
The following commands are understood:
List current sessions. The JSON format output can be toggled using --json=
or -j option.
ID…]¶Show terse runtime status information about one or more sessions, followed by the most recent log data from the journal. Takes one or more session identifiers as parameters. If no session identifiers are passed, the status of the caller's session is shown. This function is intended to generate human-readable output. If you are looking for computer-parsable output, use show-session instead.
ID…]¶Show properties of one or more sessions or the manager itself. If no argument is
specified, properties of the manager will be shown. If a session ID is specified, properties of
the session are shown. Specially, if the given ID is "self", the session to which
the loginctl process belongs is used. If "auto", the current
session is used as with "self" if exists, and falls back to the current user's
graphical session. By default, empty properties are suppressed. Use --all to show
those too. To select specific properties to show, use --property=. This command
is intended to be used whenever computer-parsable output is required. Use session-status
if you are looking for formatted human-readable output.
ID]¶Activate a session. This brings a session into the foreground if another session is currently in the foreground on the respective seat. Takes a session identifier as argument. If no argument is specified, the session of the caller is put into foreground.
ID…], unlock-session [ID…]¶Activates/deactivates the screen lock on one or more sessions, if the session supports it. Takes one or more session identifiers as arguments. If no argument is specified, the session of the caller is locked/unlocked.
Activates/deactivates the screen lock on all current sessions supporting it.
ID…¶Terminates a session. This kills all processes of the session and deallocates all resources attached to the session. If the argument is specified as empty string the session invoking the command is terminated.
ID…¶Send a signal to one or more processes of the session. Use
--kill-whom= to select which process to kill. Use --signal= to
select the signal to send. If the argument is specified as empty string the signal is sent to the
session invoking the command.
List currently logged in users. The JSON format output can be toggled using
--json= or -j option.
USER…]¶Show terse runtime status information about one or more logged in users, followed by the most recent log data from the journal. Takes one or more user names or numeric user IDs as parameters. If no parameters are passed, the status is shown for the user of the session of the caller. This function is intended to generate human-readable output. If you are looking for computer-parsable output, use show-user instead.
USER…]¶Show properties of one or more users or the
manager itself. If no argument is specified, properties of the
manager will be shown. If a user is specified, properties of
the user are shown. By default, empty properties are
suppressed. Use --all to show those too. To
select specific properties to show, use
--property=. This command is intended to be
used whenever computer-parsable output is required. Use
user-status if you are looking for
formatted human-readable output.
USER…], disable-linger [USER…]¶Enable/disable user lingering for one or more users. If enabled for a specific user, a user manager is spawned for the user at boot and kept around after logouts. This allows users who are not logged in to run long-running services. Takes one or more user names or numeric UIDs as argument. If no argument is specified, enables/disables lingering for the user of the session of the caller.
See also KillUserProcesses= setting in
logind.conf(5).
USER…¶Terminates all sessions of a user. This kills all processes of all sessions of the user and deallocates all runtime resources attached to the user. If the argument is specified as empty string the sessions of the user invoking the command are terminated.
USER…¶Send a signal to all processes of a user. Use --signal= to select
the signal to send. If the argument is specified as empty string the signal is sent to the sessions
of the user invoking the command.
List currently available seats on the local system. The JSON format output can be
toggled using --json= or -j option.
NAME…]¶Show terse runtime status information about one or more seats. Takes one or more seat names as parameters. If no seat names are passed the status of the caller's session's seat is shown. This function is intended to generate human-readable output. If you are looking for computer-parsable output, use show-seat instead.
NAME…]¶Show properties of one or more seats or the
manager itself. If no argument is specified, properties of the
manager will be shown. If a seat is specified, properties of
the seat are shown. By default, empty properties are
suppressed. Use --all to show those too. To
select specific properties to show, use
--property=. This command is intended to be
used whenever computer-parsable output is required. Use
seat-status if you are looking for
formatted human-readable output.
NAME DEVICE…¶Persistently attach one or more devices to a
seat. The devices should be specified via device paths in the
/sys/ file system. To create a new seat,
attach at least one graphics card to a previously unused seat
name. Seat names may consist only of a–z, A–Z, 0–9,
"-" and "_" and must be
prefixed with "seat". To drop assignment of a
device to a specific seat, just reassign it to a different
seat, or use flush-devices.
Removes all device assignments previously created with attach. After this call, only automatically generated seats will remain, and all seat hardware is assigned to them.
NAME…¶Terminates all sessions on a seat. This kills all processes of all sessions on the seat and deallocates all runtime resources attached to them.
The following options are understood:
-p, --property=¶When showing session/user/seat properties,
limit display to certain properties as specified as argument.
If not specified, all set properties are shown. The argument
should be a property name, such as
"Sessions". If specified more than once, all
properties with the specified names are
shown.
--value¶When showing session/user/seat properties,
only print the value, and skip the property name and
"=".
-a, --all¶When showing session/user/seat properties, show all properties regardless of whether they are set or not.
-l, --full¶Do not ellipsize process tree entries.
--kill-whom=¶When used with kill-session, choose which processes to kill.
Takes one of "leader" or "all", to select whether to kill only
the leader process of the session or all processes of the session. If omitted, defaults to
all.
-s, --signal=¶When used with kill-session or kill-user,
choose which signal to send to selected processes. Must be one of the well known signal specifiers,
such as SIGTERM, SIGINT or SIGSTOP.
If omitted, defaults to SIGTERM.
The special value "help" will list the known values and the program will exit
immediately, and the special value "list" will list known values along with the
numerical signal numbers and the program will exit immediately.
-n, --lines=¶When used with user-status and session-status, controls the number of journal lines to show, counting from the most recent ones. Takes a positive integer argument. Defaults to 10.
-o, --output=¶When used with user-status
and session-status, controls the formatting
of the journal entries that are shown. For the available
choices, see
journalctl(1).
Defaults to "short".
-H, --host=¶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.
-M, --machine=¶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.
--no-ask-password¶Do not query the user for authentication for privileged operations.
--no-pager¶Do not pipe output into a pager.
--no-legend¶Do not print the legend, i.e. column headers and the footer with hints.
--json=MODE¶Shows output formatted as JSON. Expects one of "short" (for the
shortest possible output without any redundant whitespace or line breaks), "pretty"
(for a pretty version of the same, with indentation and line breaks) or "off" (to turn
off JSON output, the default).
-j¶Equivalent to --json=pretty if running on a terminal, and
--json=short otherwise.
-h, --help¶--version¶Example 1. Querying user status
$ loginctl user-status
fatima (1005)
Since: Sat 2016-04-09 14:23:31 EDT; 54min ago
State: active
Sessions: 5 *3
Unit: user-1005.slice
├─user@1005.service
…
├─session-3.scope
…
└─session-5.scope
├─3473 login -- fatima
└─3515 -zsh
Apr 09 14:40:30 laptop login[2325]: pam_unix(login:session):
session opened for user fatima by LOGIN(uid=0)
Apr 09 14:40:30 laptop login[2325]: LOGIN ON tty3 BY fatima
There are two sessions, 3 and 5. Session 3 is a graphical session, marked with a star. The tree of processing including the two corresponding scope units and the user manager unit are shown.
$SYSTEMD_LOG_LEVEL¶The maximum log level of emitted messages (messages with a higher
log level, i.e. less important ones, will be suppressed). Takes a comma-separated list of values. A
value may be either one of (in order of decreasing importance) emerg,
alert, crit, err,
warning, notice, info,
debug, or an integer in the range 0…7. See
syslog(3)
for more information. Each value may optionally be prefixed with one of console,
syslog, kmsg or journal followed by a
colon to set the maximum log level for that specific log target (e.g.
SYSTEMD_LOG_LEVEL=debug,console:info specifies to log at debug level except when
logging to the console which should be at info level). Note that the global maximum log level takes
priority over any per target maximum log levels.
$SYSTEMD_LOG_COLOR¶A boolean. If true, messages written to the tty will be colored according to priority.
This setting is only useful when messages are written directly to the terminal, because journalctl(1) and other tools that display logs will color messages based on the log level on their own.
$SYSTEMD_LOG_TIME¶A boolean. If true, console log messages will be prefixed with a timestamp.
This setting is only useful when messages are written directly to the terminal or a file, because journalctl(1) and other tools that display logs will attach timestamps based on the entry metadata on their own.
$SYSTEMD_LOG_LOCATION¶A boolean. If true, messages will be prefixed with a filename and line number in the source code where the message originates.
Note that the log location is often attached as metadata to journal entries anyway. Including it directly in the message text can nevertheless be convenient when debugging programs.
$SYSTEMD_LOG_TID¶A boolean. If true, messages will be prefixed with the current numerical thread ID (TID).
Note that the this information is attached as metadata to journal entries anyway. Including it directly in the message text can nevertheless be convenient when debugging programs.
$SYSTEMD_LOG_TARGET¶The destination for log messages. One of
console (log to the attached tty), console-prefixed (log to
the attached tty but with prefixes encoding the log level and "facility", see syslog(3),
kmsg (log to the kernel circular log buffer), journal (log to
the journal), journal-or-kmsg (log to the journal if available, and to kmsg
otherwise), auto (determine the appropriate log target automatically, the default),
null (disable log output).
$SYSTEMD_LOG_RATELIMIT_KMSG¶ Whether to ratelimit kmsg or not. Takes a boolean.
Defaults to "true". If disabled, systemd will not ratelimit messages written to kmsg.
$SYSTEMD_PAGER¶Pager to use when --no-pager is not given; overrides
$PAGER. If neither $SYSTEMD_PAGER nor $PAGER are set, a
set of well-known pager implementations are tried in turn, including
less(1) and
more(1), until one is found. If
no pager implementation is discovered no pager is invoked. Setting this environment variable to an empty string
or the value "cat" is equivalent to passing --no-pager.
Note: if $SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE is not set, $SYSTEMD_PAGER
(as well as $PAGER) will be silently ignored.
$SYSTEMD_LESS¶Override the options passed to less (by default
"FRSXMK").
Users might want to change two options in particular:
K¶This option instructs the pager to exit immediately when Ctrl+C is pressed. To allow less to handle Ctrl+C itself to switch back to the pager command prompt, unset this option.
If the value of $SYSTEMD_LESS does not include "K",
and the pager that is invoked is less,
Ctrl+C will be ignored by the
executable, and needs to be handled by the pager.
X¶This option instructs the pager to not send termcap initialization and deinitialization strings to the terminal. It is set by default to allow command output to remain visible in the terminal even after the pager exits. Nevertheless, this prevents some pager functionality from working, in particular paged output cannot be scrolled with the mouse.
Note that setting the regular $LESS environment variable has no effect
for less invocations by systemd tools.
See less(1) for more discussion.
$SYSTEMD_LESSCHARSET¶Override the charset passed to less (by default "utf-8", if
the invoking terminal is determined to be UTF-8 compatible).
Note that setting the regular $LESSCHARSET environment variable has no effect
for less invocations by systemd tools.
$SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE¶Takes a boolean argument. When true, the "secure" mode of the pager is enabled; if
false, disabled. If $SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE is not set at all, secure mode is enabled
if the effective UID is not the same as the owner of the login session, see
geteuid(2)
and sd_pid_get_owner_uid(3).
In secure mode, LESSSECURE=1 will be set when invoking the pager, and the pager shall
disable commands that open or create new files or start new subprocesses. When
$SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE is not set at all, pagers which are not known to implement
secure mode will not be used. (Currently only
less(1)
implements secure mode.)
Note: when commands are invoked with elevated privileges, for example under sudo(8) or
pkexec(1), care
must be taken to ensure that unintended interactive features are not enabled. "Secure" mode for the
pager may be enabled automatically as describe above. Setting SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE=0
or not removing it from the inherited environment allows the user to invoke arbitrary commands. Note
that if the $SYSTEMD_PAGER or $PAGER variables are to be
honoured, $SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE must be set too. It might be reasonable to completely
disable the pager using --no-pager instead.
$SYSTEMD_COLORS¶Takes a boolean argument. When true, systemd and related utilities
will use colors in their output, otherwise the output will be monochrome. Additionally, the variable can
take one of the following special values: "16", "256" to restrict the use
of colors to the base 16 or 256 ANSI colors, respectively. This can be specified to override the automatic
decision based on $TERM and what the console is connected to.
$SYSTEMD_URLIFY¶The value must be a boolean. Controls whether clickable links should be generated in
the output for terminal emulators supporting this. This can be specified to override the decision that
systemd makes based on $TERM and other conditions.