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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | EXIT STATUS | EXAMPLE | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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SYSTEMD-NOTIFY(1) systemd-notify SYSTEMD-NOTIFY(1)
systemd-notify - Notify service manager about start-up completion
and other daemon status changes
systemd-notify [OPTIONS...] [VARIABLE=VALUE...]
systemd-notify --exec [OPTIONS...] [VARIABLE=VALUE...] ; --
{CMDLINE...}
systemd-notify --fork [OPTIONS...] -- {CMDLINE...}
systemd-notify may be called by service scripts to notify the
invoking service manager about status changes. It can be used to
send arbitrary information, encoded in an environment-block-like
list of strings. Most importantly, it can be used for start-up
completion notification.
This is mostly just a wrapper around sd_notify() and makes this
functionality available to shell scripts. For details see
sd_notify(3).
The command line may carry a list of environment variables to send
as part of the status update.
Note that systemd will refuse reception of status updates from
this command unless NotifyAccess= is appropriately set for the
service unit this command is called from. See systemd.service(5)
for details.
Note that sd_notify() notifications may be attributed to units
correctly only if either the sending process is still around at
the time the service manager processes the message, or if the
sending process is explicitly runtime-tracked by the service
manager. The latter is the case if the service manager originally
forked off the process, i.e. on all processes that match
NotifyAccess=main or NotifyAccess=exec. Conversely, if an
auxiliary process of the unit sends an sd_notify() message and
immediately exits, the service manager might not be able to
properly attribute the message to the unit, and thus will ignore
it, even if NotifyAccess=all is set for it. To address this
systemd-notify will wait until the notification message has been
processed by the service manager. When --no-block is used, this
synchronization for reception of notifications is disabled, and
hence the aforementioned race may occur if the invoking process is
not the service manager or spawned by the service manager.
systemd-notify will first attempt to invoke sd_notify() pretending
to have the PID of the parent process of systemd-notify (i.e. the
invoking process). This will only succeed when invoked with
sufficient privileges. On failure, it will then fall back to
invoking it under its own PID. This behaviour is useful in order
that when the tool is invoked from a shell script the shell
process — and not the systemd-notify process — appears as sender
of the message, which in turn is helpful if the shell process is
the main process of a service, due to the limitations of
NotifyAccess=all. Use the --pid= switch to tweak this behaviour.
The following options are understood:
--ready
Inform the invoking service manager about service start-up or
configuration reload completion. This is equivalent to
systemd-notify READY=1. For details about the semantics of
this option see sd_notify(3).
--reloading
Inform the invoking service manager about the beginning of a
configuration reload cycle. This is equivalent to
systemd-notify RELOADING=1 (but implicitly also sets a
MONOTONIC_USEC= field as required for Type=notify-reload
services, see systemd.service(5) for details). For details
about the semantics of this option see sd_notify(3).
Added in version 253.
--stopping
Inform the invoking service manager about the beginning of the
shutdown phase of the service. This is equivalent to
systemd-notify STOPPING=1. For details about the semantics of
this option see sd_notify(3).
Added in version 253.
--pid=
Inform the service manager about the main PID of the service.
Takes a PID as argument. If the argument is specified as
"auto" or omitted, the PID of the process that invoked
systemd-notify is used, except if that's the service manager.
If the argument is specified as "self", the PID of the
systemd-notify command itself is used, and if "parent" is
specified the calling process' PID is used — even if it is the
service manager. --pid=auto is equivalent to systemd-notify
--pid=$PID. For details about the semantics of this option see
sd_notify(3).
systemd-notify will first attempt to invoke sd_notify()
pretending to have the PID specified with --pid=. This will
only succeed when invoked with sufficient privileges. On
failure, it will then fall back to invoking it under its own
PID. Effectively, this means that a privileged invocation of
systemd-notify --pid= may circumvent NotifyAccess=main or
NotifyAccess=exec restrictions enforced for a service.
If this switch is used in an unprivileged systemd-notify
invocation from a process that shall become the new main
process of a service — and which is not the process forked off
by the service manager (or the current main process) —, then
it is essential to set NotifyAccess=all in the service unit
file, or otherwise the notification will be ignored for
security reasons. See systemd.service(5) for details.
--uid=USER
Set the user ID to send the notification from. Takes a UNIX
user name or numeric UID. When specified the notification
message will be sent with the specified UID as sender, in
place of the user the command was invoked as. This option
requires sufficient privileges in order to be able manipulate
the user identity of the process.
Added in version 237.
--status=
Send a free-form human-readable status string for the daemon
to the service manager. This option takes the status string as
argument. This is equivalent to systemd-notify STATUS=.... For
details about the semantics of this option see sd_notify(3).
This information is shown in systemctl(1)'s status output,
among other places.
--booted
Returns 0 if the system was booted up with systemd, non-zero
otherwise. If this option is passed, no message is sent. This
option is hence unrelated to the other options. For details
about the semantics of this option, see sd_booted(3). An
alternate way to check for this state is to call systemctl(1)
with the is-system-running command. It will return "offline"
if the system was not booted with systemd.
--no-block
Do not synchronously wait for the requested operation to
finish. Use of this option is only recommended when
systemd-notify is spawned by the service manager, or when the
invoking process is directly spawned by the service manager
and has enough privileges to allow systemd-notify to send the
notification on its behalf. Sending notifications with this
option set is prone to race conditions in all other cases.
Added in version 246.
--exec
If specified systemd-notify will execute another command line
after it completed its operation, replacing its own process.
If used, the list of assignments to include in the message
sent must be followed by a ";" character (as separate
argument), followed by the command line to execute. This
permits "chaining" of commands, i.e. issuing one operation,
followed immediately by another, without changing PIDs.
Note that many shells interpret ";" as their own separator for
command lines, hence when systemd-notify is invoked from a
shell the semicolon must usually be escaped as "\;".
Added in version 254.
--fd=
Send a file descriptor along with the notification message.
This is useful when invoked in services that have the
FileDescriptorStoreMax= setting enabled, see
systemd.service(5) for details. The specified file descriptor
must be passed to systemd-notify when invoked. This option may
be used multiple times to pass multiple file descriptors in a
single notification message.
To use this functionality from a bash(1) shell, use an
expression like the following:
systemd-notify --fd=4 --fd=5 4</some/file 5</some/other/file
Added in version 254.
--fdname=
Set a name to assign to the file descriptors passed via --fd=
(see above). This controls the "FDNAME=" field. This setting
may only be specified once, and applies to all file
descriptors passed. Invoke this tool multiple times in case
multiple file descriptors with different file descriptor names
shall be submitted.
Added in version 254.
--fork
Instead of sending a notification message, fork off a command
line and wait until a "READY=1" message is received from it.
In other words: this makes systemd-notify the receiver of
notification messages instead of the sender, swapping roles.
This is useful to quickly fork off a process that implements
the sd_notify() protocol from a shell script. The invoked
command line will have standard input and standard output
connected to /dev/null, but standard error will be inherited
from the invoking process. The numeric process ID is written
to standard output by systemd-notify (unless --quiet is
specified), which may be used to later terminate the forked
off process.
Note that processes forked off like this will likely remain
running after systemd-notify already returned, which hence
will result in them being reparented to the closest process
reaper process, i.e. typically the per-user or system service
manager.
Note that this option should not be used to invoke full
services ad-hoc, use systemd-run for that.
Also note that when invoked with this switch systemd-notify
will exit successfully under two distinction conditions:
1. systemd-notify received a "READY=1" notification from the
child it just forked off.
2. The child process exited cleanly (with exit status zero)
before sending "READY=1".
Example use:
# PID=$(systemd-notify --fork -- mycommand)
...
kill "$PID"
unset PID
Added in version 258.
--quiet, -q
Turn off output of the numeric process ID when --fork is used.
Added in version 258.
-h, --help
Print a short help text and exit.
--version
Print a short version string and exit.
On success, 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise.
Example 1. Start-up Notification and Status Updates
A simple shell daemon that sends start-up notifications after
having set up its communication channel. During runtime it sends
further status updates to the init system:
#!/bin/sh
mkfifo /tmp/waldo
systemd-notify --ready --status="Waiting for data..."
while : ; do
read -r a < /tmp/waldo
systemd-notify --status="Processing $a"
# Do something with $a ...
systemd-notify --status="Waiting for data..."
done
systemd(1), systemctl(1), systemd.unit(5), systemd.service(5),
sd_notify(3), sd_booted(3)
This page is part of the systemd (systemd system and service
manager) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, see
⟨http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#bugreports⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/systemd/systemd.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-08-11.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
systemd 258~rc2 SYSTEMD-NOTIFY(1)
Pages that refer to this page: systemd(1), systemd.directives(7), systemd.index(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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