Bug 55093

Summary:	systemctl error message on fail could be better
Product:	systemd	Reporter:	Dave Neary <dneary>
Component:	general	Assignee:	systemd-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	systemd-bugs
Severity:	minor
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Dave Neary 2012-09-19 13:03:49 UTC

I was installing dnsmasq and had a silly error in the config file. When I tried to start the service, I got the following error message: 

[root@clare etc]# service dnsmasq start
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl start  dnsmasq.service
Job failed. See system journal and 'systemctl status' for details.

Not knowing systemd very well, I followed the instructions and ran:

[root@clare etc]# systemctl status
Too few arguments.

I found the system journal errors in /var/log/messages

I have since learned that I needed to call systemctl status with 
"systemctl status dnsmasq.service"
or
"systemctl status -o cat dnsmasq.service"

and that the recommended way to access the system log with systemd is to use "journalctl".

How about modifying the error message to the following (service name can be picked up from the command line/service redirect):

Job failed. See 'journalctl -n 50' and 'systemctl status dnsmasq.service' for details.

Comment 1 Lennart Poettering 2012-10-30 22:24:43 UTC

Newer versions of systemctl (F18 and newer) actually do include the full command lines to run, including the service name where appropriate. Clsoing.

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