systemctl restart xxx* does not restart inactive services

[Jake Yip]

Man pages of systemctl indicates that the start, restart, status takes in [PATTERN], which accepts wildcard.

However, for an inactive service, it does not work UNLESS --all is provided, which does not make sense for a command like restart. If one wants to restart only if service is active, there is the try-restart command.

To replicate

1. Stop a service. `systemctl stop sysstat.service`
2. Restart with wildcard. `systemctl restart sysstat*`
3. Check service status. It should still be inactive.
4. Restart with --all wildcard. `systemctl restart --all sysstat*`
5. Check again, service should have been started.

More logs below

root@notifications-m:~# systemctl status sysstat.service
● sysstat.service - LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/sysstat; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (exited) since Mon 2016-09-26 16:22:02 AEST; 48min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 3607 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/sysstat stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 3809 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/sysstat start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    Tasks: 0
   Memory: 0B
      CPU: 0

Sep 26 16:22:02 notifications-m systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc...
Sep 26 16:22:02 notifications-m systemd[1]: Started LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc.
root@notifications-m:~# systemctl stop sysstat.service
root@notifications-m:~# systemctl status sysstat.service
● sysstat.service - LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/sysstat; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead) since Mon 2016-09-26 17:10:16 AEST; 1s ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 8228 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/sysstat stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 3809 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/sysstat start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Sep 26 16:22:02 notifications-m systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc...
Sep 26 16:22:02 notifications-m systemd[1]: Started LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc.
Sep 26 17:10:16 notifications-m systemd[1]: Stopping LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc...
Sep 26 17:10:16 notifications-m systemd[1]: Stopped LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc.
(reverse-i-search)`restar': systemctl ^Cstart --all ceilometer-agent-notification*
root@notifications-m:~# systemctl restart sysstat*
root@notifications-m:~# systemctl status sysstat.service
● sysstat.service - LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/sysstat; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead) since Mon 2016-09-26 17:10:16 AEST; 16s ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 8228 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/sysstat stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 3809 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/sysstat start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Sep 26 16:22:02 notifications-m systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc...
Sep 26 16:22:02 notifications-m systemd[1]: Started LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc.
Sep 26 17:10:16 notifications-m systemd[1]: Stopping LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc...
Sep 26 17:10:16 notifications-m systemd[1]: Stopped LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc.
root@notifications-m:~# systemctl restart --all sysstat*
root@notifications-m:~# systemctl status sysstat.service
● sysstat.service - LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/sysstat; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (exited) since Mon 2016-09-26 17:10:39 AEST; 1s ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 8228 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/sysstat stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 8250 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/sysstat start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Sep 26 17:10:39 notifications-m systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc...
Sep 26 17:10:39 notifications-m systemd[1]: Started LSB: Start/stop sysstat's sadc.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Right. As the manpage states, inactive units are not considered: "Units which are not active and are not in a failed state usually are not loaded, and will not be matched by any pattern."

This isn't a behaviour that we can or want to change downstream, so closing. Thanks!