SYSTEMD-INHIBIT(1)

💖 systemd-inhibit — the systemd-inhibit(1) glow-up 💖

okay bestie, sit DOWN, because this little tool is genuinely iconic and nobody talks about it. it's systemd-inhibit, section 1 of the manual, and it is the reason your laptop doesn't fall asleep mid-burn. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

systemd-inhibit — run a program while holding an inhibition lock, like a little bodyguard for your processes 🫶

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🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

systemd-inhibit [OPTIONS...] [COMMAND] [ARGUMENTS...]

systemd-inhibit [OPTIONS...] [--list]

two whole moods. either you're running something, or you're just listing. pick your fighter ✨

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the tea: systemd-inhibit runs a program for you with a shutdown, sleep, or idle inhibitor lock held. it grabs the lock before the command line runs, and lets it go afterwards. it's giving responsible friend who holds your purse while you're in the mosh pit 💅

inhibitor locks are how you block or delay system sleep and shutdown requests from the user, plus the OS's automatic idle handling. why would you want that? say you're recording an optical disc, or doing literally any operation that should NOT be interrupted. without a lock, your system might just… go to sleep. mid-write. and that would be a tragedy. 😭

want the full lore? there's an Inhibitor Locks write-up for that, no cap.

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

here's everything you can pass. every single one, we're not skipping, that's the rule:

• --what= — takes a colon-separated list of one or more operations to inhibit: "shutdown", "sleep", "idle", "handle-power-key", "handle-reboot-key", "handle-suspend-key", "handle-hibernate-key", "handle-lid-switch". those inhibit reboot/power-off/halt/kexec/soft-reboot, suspending/hibernating, the automatic idle detection, or the low-level handling of the power/reboot/sleep key and the lid switch, respectively. if you leave it out, it defaults to "idle:sleep:shutdown". yes, three things, colon-separated, exactly like that. 🍓
• --who= — takes a short, human-readable descriptive string for the program that's taking the lock. don't pass it? it defaults to the command line string. so it'll just describe itself, king behavior honestly 👑
• --why= — takes a short, human-readable descriptive string explaining why you're taking the lock. defaults to "Unknown reason". (put a real reason in there, bestie, future-you will thank you 🙈)
• --mode= — takes "block", "delay", or "block-weak", and describes how the lock gets applied:
  • "block" (the default) — the lock prohibits any of the requested operations with no time limit, and only privileged users may override it.
  • "block-weak" — similar to "block", but it is not enforced against operations initiated by privileged clients, or by those owned by the user that also owns the inhibitor lock. lowkey a softer block, iykyk.
  • "delay" — the lock can only delay the requested operations for a limited time. if that time elapses, the lock is ignored and the operation just goes ahead. that time limit is specified in logind.conf(5). also heads up: "delay" is only available for "sleep" and "shutdown". that's it, nowhere else. 🚫
• --list — lists all active inhibition locks instead of acquiring one. you can filter it using --what=, --who=, --why=, or --mode=. it's the "who's holding what right now" view. so nosy, love that. 🔥
• --no-ask-password — do not query the user for authentication for privileged operations. no pop-up, no password prompt, just vibes. 💀
• --no-pager — do not pipe output into a pager.
• --no-legend — do not print the legend, i.e. the column headers and the footer with hints. minimalism era ✨
• --json=MODE — shows output formatted as JSON. expects one of "short" (the shortest possible output, without any redundant whitespace or line breaks), "pretty" (a pretty version of the same, with indentation and line breaks) or "off" (to turn off JSON output — and that's the default). pick your aesthetic 🌸
• -h, --help — print a short help text and exit.
• --version — print a short version string and exit.

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🎀 EXIT STATUS 🎀

returns the exit status of the executed program. so if your program blew up, this blows up the same way. honest king. no notes. 🫶

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⭐ EXAMPLE ⭐

# systemd-inhibit wodim foobar.iso

this burns the ISO image foobar.iso onto a CD using wodim(1), and inhibits system sleeping, shutdown and idle while doing so. iconic behavior, truly. no more ruined discs, periodt. 💖

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part 1 done, bestie — but we are NOT finished, there's more coming, don't go anywhere 🧚

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

These are the environment variables that quietly change how everything goes down, bestie. Read them, love them, set them responsibly 🫶

💖 $SYSTEMD_LOG_LEVEL

The maximum log level of emitted messages — anything with a higher log level (aka less important, no offense 💀) gets suppressed. Takes a comma-separated list of values. A value may be either one of (in order of decreasing importance) emerg, alert, crit, err, warning, notice, info, debug, or an integer in the range 0...7. See syslog(3) for more information.

Each value may optionally be prefixed with one of console, syslog, kmsg or journal followed by a colon, to set the maximum log level for that specific log target. Like, SYSTEMD_LOG_LEVEL=debug,console:info specifies to log at debug level except when logging to the console, which should be at info level.

Note that the global maximum log level takes priority over any per target maximum log levels. Global stays winning, periodt 👑

🎨 $SYSTEMD_LOG_COLOR

A boolean. If true, messages written to the tty will be colored according to priority.

This setting is only useful when messages are written directly to the terminal, because journalctl(1) and other tools that display logs will color messages based on the log level on their own. They got it, they don't need your help.

⏰ $SYSTEMD_LOG_TIME

A boolean. If true, console log messages will be prefixed with a timestamp.

Same deal: this setting is only useful when messages are written directly to the terminal or a file, because journalctl(1) and other tools that display logs will attach timestamps based on the entry metadata on their own.

📍 $SYSTEMD_LOG_LOCATION

A boolean. If true, messages will be prefixed with a filename and line number in the source code where the message originates.

Note that the log location is often attached as metadata to journal entries anyway. Including it directly in the message text can nevertheless be convenient when debugging programs.

🧵 $SYSTEMD_LOG_TID

A boolean. If true, messages will be prefixed with the current numerical thread ID (TID).

Note that this information is attached as metadata to journal entries anyway. Including it directly in the message text can nevertheless be convenient when debugging programs.

🎯 $SYSTEMD_LOG_TARGET

The destination for log messages. One of:

• console — log to the attached tty
• console-prefixed — log to the attached tty but with prefixes encoding the log level and "facility", see syslog(3)
• kmsg — log to the kernel circular log buffer
• journal — log to the journal
• journal-or-kmsg — log to the journal if available, and to kmsg otherwise
• auto — determine the appropriate log target automatically, the default ✨
• null — disable log output

🔇 $SYSTEMD_LOG_RATELIMIT_KMSG

Whether to ratelimit kmsg or not. Takes a boolean. Defaults to "true". If disabled, systemd will not ratelimit messages written to kmsg.

📄 $SYSTEMD_PAGER, $PAGER

Pager to use when --no-pager is not given. $SYSTEMD_PAGER is used if set; otherwise $PAGER is used. If neither $SYSTEMD_PAGER nor $PAGER are set, a set of well-known pager implementations is tried in turn, including less(1) and more(1), until one is found. If no pager implementation is discovered, no pager is invoked. Setting those environment variables to an empty string or the value "cat" is equivalent to passing --no-pager.

Note: if $SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE is not set, $SYSTEMD_PAGER and $PAGER can only be used to disable the pager (with "cat" or ""), and are otherwise ignored. iykyk.

🧾 $SYSTEMD_LESS

Override the options passed to less (by default "FRSXMK").

Users might want to change two options in particular:

K

This option instructs the pager to exit immediately when Ctrl+C is pressed. To allow less to handle Ctrl+C itself to switch back to the pager command prompt, unset this option.

If the value of $SYSTEMD_LESS does not include "K", and the pager that is invoked is less, Ctrl+C will be ignored by the executable, and needs to be handled by the pager.

X

This option instructs the pager to not send termcap initialization and deinitialization strings to the terminal. It is set by default to allow command output to remain visible in the terminal even after the pager exits. Nevertheless, this prevents some pager functionality from working, in particular paged output cannot be scrolled with the mouse 🖱️

Note that setting the regular $LESS environment variable has no effect for less invocations by systemd tools.

See less(1) for more discussion.

🔤 $SYSTEMD_LESSCHARSET

Override the charset passed to less (by default "utf-8", if the invoking terminal is determined to be UTF-8 compatible).

Note that setting the regular $LESSCHARSET environment variable has no effect for less invocations by systemd tools.

🔐 $SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE

Okay bestie, this one is the serious one, stay with me. Common pager commands like less(1), in addition to "paging", i.e. scrolling through the output, support opening of or writing to other files and running arbitrary shell commands. When commands are invoked with elevated privileges, for example under sudo(8) or pkexec(1), the pager becomes a security boundary. Care must be taken that only programs with strictly limited functionality are used as pagers, and unintended interactive features like opening or creation of new files or starting of subprocesses are not allowed. "Secure mode" for the pager may be enabled as described below, if the pager supports that (most pagers are not written in a way that takes this into consideration). It is recommended to either explicitly enable "secure mode" or to completely disable the pager using --no-pager or PAGER=cat when allowing untrusted users to execute commands with elevated privileges.

This option takes a boolean argument. When set to true, the "secure mode" of the pager is enabled. In "secure mode", LESSSECURE=1 will be set when invoking the pager, which instructs the pager to disable commands that open or create new files or start new subprocesses. Currently only less(1) is known to understand this variable and implement "secure mode".

When set to false, no limitation is placed on the pager. Setting SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE=0 or not removing it from the inherited environment may allow the user to invoke arbitrary commands. Yeah, that's a yikes from me 😭

When $SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE is not set, systemd tools attempt to automatically figure out if "secure mode" should be enabled and whether the pager supports it. "Secure mode" is enabled if the effective UID is not the same as the owner of the login session, see geteuid(2) and sd_pid_get_owner_uid(3), or when running under sudo(8) or similar tools ($SUDO_UID is set [2]). In those cases, SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE=1 will be set and pagers which are not known to implement "secure mode" will not be used at all. Note that this autodetection only covers the most common mechanisms to elevate privileges and is intended as convenience. It is recommended to explicitly set $SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE or disable the pager.

Note that if the $SYSTEMD_PAGER or $PAGER variables are to be honoured, other than to disable the pager, $SYSTEMD_PAGERSECURE must be set too.

🌈 $SYSTEMD_COLORS

Takes a boolean argument, or a special value. By default (unset), systemd and related utilities will use colors in their output if possible. If $COLORTERM is set to "truecolor" or "24bit", 24-bit colors will be enabled, 256 colors otherwise, unless $NO_COLOR or $TERM indicates colors are disabled.

• true — same as unset, except that $NO_COLOR is ignored.
• false — the output will be monochrome. 🖤🤍
• "16", "256", "24bit" — always use the base 16 ANSI colors, 256 colors, or 24 bit color, respectively.
• "auto-16", "auto-256", "auto-24bit" — use the given quantity of colours, subject to $TERM, and what the console is connected to.

🔗 $SYSTEMD_URLIFY

The value must be a boolean. Controls whether clickable links should be generated in the output for terminal emulators supporting this. This can be specified to override the decision that systemd makes based on $TERM and other conditions.

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• systemd(1)
• logind.conf(5)

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📝 NOTES 📝

1. Inhibitor Locks — https://systemd.io/INHIBITOR_LOCKS
2. It is recommended for other tools to set and check $SUDO_UID as appropriate, treating it as a common interface.

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And that's the whole page, bestie, you ate it 🎀 this lil gem is systemd version 262.1, and it lives under the name SYSTEMD-INHIBIT(1) — go forth and inhibit responsibly ✨💜