Chkservice – An Easy Way to Manage Systemd Units in Terminal

Systemd (system daemon) is a modern system management daemon for Linux systems. Systemd is a replacement for init system manager; it controls system startup and services, and introduces the idea of units (managed via unit files) to identify different types of system resources such as services, devices, swap, automount, targets, paths, sockets and others.

It ships in with systemctl, a component for controlling systemd’s behavior and units (starting, stopping, restarting, viewing status etc) using the command line. What if you simply want to manage units using keyboard shortcuts, that is where chkservice comes in.

Chkservice is an easy-to-use, ncurses-based command line tool for managing systemd units on a terminal. It lists units alphabetically under the categories (services, targets, automounts etc), showing the their status and description, and allows you, with superuser privileges to start, stop, enable and disable units

Install chkservice in Linux Systems

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chkservice

sudo chkservice

Chksericve unit status information:

[x] – shows a unit is enabled. [ ] – shows a unit is disabled. [s] – indicates a static unit. -m- – shows a unit is masked. = – indicates unit has been stopped.

– shows unit is running. Below are the chkservice navigation keys:

Up/k – move cursor up. Down/j – move cursor down. PgUp/b – move page up. PgDown/f – move page down. The following are chkservice action keys:

r – updates or reload information. Space bar – used to enable or disable a unit. s – for starting or stopping a unit. q – exit. To view the help page as shown in the screenshot below, use ? (press [Shift + /]).