Systemctl Behaves Like It Is Being Piped To Less In CentOS 8?

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Comparing the output of systemctl between CentOS 7 and 8:

[root@mail ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release CentOS Linux release 7.7.1908 (Core)
[root@mail ~]# systemctl status firewalld
● firewalld.service – firewalld – dynamic firewall daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/firewalld.service; enabled;
vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Fri 2019-10-25 00:24:24 UTC; 1
months 19 days ago
Docs: man:firewalld(1)
Main PID: 6578 (firewalld)
CGroup: /system.slice/firewalld.service
└─6578 /usr/bin/python2 -Es /usr/sbin/firewalld –nofork –nopid

Warning: Journal has been rotated since unit was started. Log output is incomplete or unavailable.
[root@mail ~]#

So far so good. Don’t know why it is complaining about log being rotated but output looks readable. Now, let’s grab a CentOS8 box:

[raub@vmhost2 ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release CentOS Linux release 8.0.1905 (Core)
[raub@vmhost2 ~]$ systemctl status firewalld
● firewalld.service – firewalld – dynamic firewall daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/firewalld.service; enabled; vendor p>
Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-12-10 20:10:20 EST; 2 days ago
Docs: man:firewalld(1)
Main PID: 1031 (firewalld)
Tasks: 2 (limit: 26213)
Memory: 33.5M
CGroup: /system.slice/firewalld.service
└─1031 /usr/libexec/platform-python -s /usr/sbin/firewalld –nofork >
lines 1-9/9 (END)

As you can see, it is trimming the output at the end of my terminal window, which I do not care; there are options (-i I think) to make it wrap around, but the line

lines 1-9/9 (END)

is what is annoying me. That seems to be what I would expect if I
piped it to less. I checked a fedora 31 and another CentOS 8 box and am seeing the same behaviour. Am I missing something?

7 thoughts on - Systemctl Behaves Like It Is Being Piped To Less In CentOS 8?

  • The environment variable $PAGER determines what pager to use. The default is ‘less’. User

    export PAGER=more

    to use ‘more’ instead. Or

    export PAGER
    to not pipe to a pager.

    P,

  • It seems this became the default at some point.

    systemctl -l –no-pager

    is the way to get it without that. The whole does it use a pager, does it ellipse, etc has been a long fight where various people complain enough to get it one way or another. It usually goes with the group that complains the nicest versus the ones who complain the worst :).

    —
    Stephen J Smoogen.

  • Also, there’s this bit in the default .bashrc on EL8:

    # Uncomment the following line if you don’t like systemctl’s auto-paging feature:
    # export SYSTEMD_PAGER=

  • Thanks . I did the alias a long time that I forgot about the line you actually quote in the next email :).

  • In article <5c2439dc6351659900b0c7ef421ae3f1e7b84fe4.camel@biggs.org.uk>, Pete Biggs wrote:

    This would also affect “man”. Better to use SYSTEMD_PAGER.

    Cheers Tony