Currently list-dependencies prints a colored dot by default indicating status: green is active, red is inactive. This is not documented in the man page for systemctl. A paragraph like the following might help: <para>If the <option>--plain</option> option is not specified, each unit will be prefixed by a colored dot, indicating the current activity status of the unit. Green indicates the unit is currently active, red indicates the unit is inactive.</para> However, that is a lot of states to collapse into red: a unit may be inactive because it is failed, or perhaps it just wasn't pulled in by anything, or it maybe doesn't even exist. Red also marks oneshot units that exited successfully! I think using the same color scheme as systemctl status use for the active state makes sense: uncolored for inactive without errors (including not found units), yellow for condition failures, and red for error states.
I would like to point out that the --plain does not suppress printing the colored dots (systemd version 216-25.fc21). That option only suppresses the line drawing characters that are described as "tree" format. If stdout is not a tty (instead a regular file or a pipe) the dots are still printed but without the red and green colors. The systemctl program needs some work to improve output so that it is parsable by coreutils programs.
Hello, It would be good to add black color (not started, condition failed) to man page indications may be we can have a systemd-colors man page ? and make a reference on all the commands where colors are used ? Thank you !
The scheme used by 'list-dependencies' should be changed to match 'status'. Anything else is just too confusing. We might want to document the color scheme somewhere in systemctl(1). I don't think we should add a separate man page, because we already have 200+ systemd man pages, the color scheme is not guaranteed to be stable, it might be adjusted in the future, and we should not give too much prominence to it.
The color scheme is now that green is used for active, white for inactive, red for failed. So this seems to be fixed since a while. If further adjustments are needed, please open a bug under https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues.
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