TELINIT(8)

💖 TELINIT — bestie edition 💖

okay so real talk, the manual name is telinit and it lives in section 8 (that's the sysadmin/system-management girlies section, iykyk) 👑

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✨ NAME ✨

telinit — change the SysV runlevel, bestie 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

telinit [OPTIONS...] {COMMAND}

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so telinit is the girl who can change the SysV system runlevel. periodt.

but here's the tea: the whole concept of SysV runlevels is obsolete now 🙈, so your runlevel requests are gonna get transparently translated into systemd unit activation requests. like, she's not even doing the thing anymore, she's just quietly forwarding your vibes to systemd. lowkey iconic of her honestly ✨

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

the following options are understood (yes, understood, she's a great listener 💜):

• --help — prints a short help text and then dips. short and sweet, we love a queen who doesn't overstay 🌸
• --no-wall — do not send a wall message before reboot/halt/power-off. like, no announcement, just ✨ gone ✨

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🫶 THE COMMANDS (yes these count as options, she contains multitudes) 🫶

the following commands are understood:

• 0 — power-off the machine. this gets translated into an activation request for poweroff.target and is equivalent to systemctl poweroff. bye bestie, lights out 💀
• 6 — reboot the machine. translated into an activation request for reboot.target, equivalent to systemctl reboot. it's giving main character comeback arc 🌈
• 2, 3, 4, 5 — change the SysV runlevel. this gets translated into an activation request for runlevel2.target, runlevel3.target, ... and is equivalent to systemctl isolate runlevel2.target, systemctl isolate runlevel3.target, ... — pick your number, pick your vibe, slay 🔥
• 1, s, S — change into system rescue mode. translated into an activation request for rescue.target and equivalent to systemctl rescue. it's giving ✨healing era✨ 🧚
• q, Q — reload daemon configuration. equivalent to systemctl daemon-reload. refresh, reboot the soul, not the machine 💅
• u, U — serialize state, reexecute daemon and deserialize state again. equivalent to systemctl daemon-reexec. yes that's a real sentence and yes it's a whole journey, but she ate 🍓

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💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

on success, 0 is returned. otherwise you get a non-zero failure code. no in-between, no crumbs 😭

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🚨 NOTES 🚨

bestie. listen. this is a legacy command available for compatibility only. it should not be used anymore, because the concept of runlevels is obsolete. she's here for the nostalgia, not for the function 🙈

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

systemd(1), systemctl(1), wall(1)

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okay that's the whole page, you're welcome, go forth and systemctl instead 💖

this was brought to you by systemd 257.13 (the version, the moment, the era) and it's stamped TELINIT(8) — mwah, stan a manual page, bye 🎀✨🦋