Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

Auditing system services with systemctl

On Linux systems that come with systemd, the systemctl command is pretty much a universal command that does many things for you. In addition to controlling your system's services, it can also show you the status of those services, like so:

donnie@linux-0ro8:~> sudo systemctl -t service --state=active

Here's the breakdown of the preceding command:

• -t service: We want to view information about the services – or, what used to be called daemons – on the system.
• --state=active: This specifies that we want to view information about all the system services that are actually running.

A partial output of this command looks something like this:

UNIT                                                  LOAD   ACTIVE SUB     DESCRIPTIONaccounts-daemon.service loaded ...