OpenRC to systemd Cheatsheet

This article is for users that have recently converted from OpenRC to systemd. It contains a list of commands commonly used in OpenRC and its equivalent systemd command.

Note
The following table is not an exhaustive list and is not intended to replace reading man pages.

Command	OpenRC	systemd	Comments
Start a service	/etc/init.d/<service> start rc-service <service> start	systemctl start <service>
Stop a service	/etc/init.d/<service> stop rc-service <service> stop	systemctl stop <service>
Restart a service	/etc/init.d/<service> restart rc-service <service> restart	systemctl restart <service>
Get service status	/etc/init.d/<service> status rc-service <service> status	systemctl status <service>
Show known startup scripts	rc-status rc-update show	systemctl list-units	Shows scripts that exist in runlevels
Show all startup scripts	ls /etc/init.d/ rc-update -v show	systemctl list-unit-files --type=service	Shows all installed scripts
Enable service at startup	rc-update add <service> <runlevel>	systemctl enable <service>
Disable service at startup	rc-update del <service> <runlevel>	systemctl disable <service>

The following table is a list of useful systemd commands that have no OpenRC equivalent:

Command	Syntax	Comments
Disable automatically generated service	systemctl mask <service>	Disables dynamically generated services in systemd, which unit files are generated on demand (usually storage triggered services).
Kill all processes related to service	systemctl kill <service>
Show logs events that happened today, most recent events first	journalctl -r --since=today
Show log events for a specific service	journalctl _SYSTEMD_UNIT=<service>.service

See also

• OpenRC — a dependency-based init system for Unix-like systems that maintains compatibility with the system-provided init system
• Systemd — a modern SysV-style init and rc replacement for Linux systems.