Linux Administration Cookbook

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The concept of enabled and disabled is relatively easy to understand, those states being that the service will either try to run or it won't.

static is something different; this is the terminology used when a unit file exists, isn't enabled, but has no ability to become enabled, owing to a missing [Install] section of its unit file.

We can list these services with the following line:

$ systemctl --no-pager list-unit-files --type service --state static

Taking a service at random (sshd-keygen), we can have a look at its service file like so:

$ systemctl cat sshd-keygen.service

Using systemctl's cat option is great, as it also shows you the location of the unit file in question.

We get the following:

# /usr/lib/systemd/system/sshd-keygen.service ...