Raspberry Pi

How to Check the Status of a Service in Raspberry Pi OS

Raspberry Pi belongs to the category of Single Board Computers and it has a wide range of applications in automation projects, robotics, and computing. It can also be used for running multiple operating systems and among them the Raspberry Pi OS is the recommended OS for your device.

While working on Raspberry Pi OS, sometime you may find a service not working on your Raspberry Pi system and you might feel the need to check the status of it to resolve it. If you don’t know how to check for service status on Raspberry Pi, follow this article guidelines.

Let’s begin!

Check the Status of a Service

To check the status of the services on Raspberry Pi, first you must find the number of services running on your Raspberry Pi system. You can use the command mentioned below to see the status of all the services running on your Raspberry Pi system.

$ sudo service --status-all

After running the above command, all services will show up on the screen along with service indicators. There are three service indicators which are:

  • Plus [+]
  • Minus [-]
  • Question Mark [?]

The description of each indicator is mentioned below:

1: Plus [+] Indicator

The plus indicator represents that these services are working fine; like in above image avahi-daemon, bluetooth and crons have plus [+] indicator with them that means they are working fine in the system.

2: Minus [-] Indicator

The Minus indicator represents that the service is not running or is inactive on your Raspberry Pi system. In my case alsa-utils, apparmor, fio, and some other services are not running, which is represented by the [-] Indicator.

3: Question Mark [?] Indicator

This indicator shows up when a user has restricted some services. In my case, I haven’t restricted any of the services so there is no question mark [?] indicator.

Now, after finding the services running on the Raspberry Pi system, it’s now time to check the status of a service whether it’s active or not and you can do so by running the following command:

$ systemctl is-active <service name>

Note: Remember to replace <service name> with the name of service you want to check the status. Like in the below example, I have checked the status of two services, which are lightdm and fio.

As a result of the above command, the active and in-active status of the service is displayed as output.

You can also check the service status using the following command:

$ systemctl status <service_name>

In case the service is stopped, you can start it using the following command:

$ systemctl start <service_name>

The active (running) status of the service shows that it’s running fine on Raspberry Pi.

To reload or restart the service, just replace the “start” with “reload” or “restart” in the above command. This will restart the service on your Raspberry Pi system.

The same type of output you will get when execute the following command:

$ sudo service <service_name> status

Conclusion

To check the status of all services running on the Raspberry Pi system, you can use the “service all” command as it displays the status of all the services with service indicator signs [+], [-], and [?]. These indicators show whether the service is active, inactive, or restricted on your Raspberry Pi system. You can also check the status of a particular service using the “systemctl” or “service” commands along with the name of the service. If somehow the service is stopped, you can start it anytime by using the “systemctl start” command.

About the author

Zahra Zamir

An Electronics graduate who loves to learn and share the knowledge, my passion for my field has helped me grasp complex electronics concepts and now I am here to share them with others.