How to check if a service that I don't know the name of is running on Ubuntu

I do not know the service's name, but would like to stop the service by checking its status.

For example, if I want to check if the PostgreSQL service is running or not, but I don't know the service's name, then how could I check its status?

I know the command to check the status if the service name is known.

4

14 Answers

I don't have an Ubuntu box, but on Red Hat Linux you can see all running services by running the following command:

service --status-all 

On the list the + indicates the service is running, - indicates service is not running, ? indicates the service state cannot be determined.

8

For Ubuntu (checked with 12.04)

You can get list of all services and select by color one of them with 'grep':

sudo service --status-all | grep postgres 

Or you may use another way if you know correct name of service:

sudo service postgresql status 
3

Maybe what you want is the ps command;

ps -ef 

will show you all processes running. Then if you have an idea of what you're looking for use grep to filter;

ps -ef | grep postgres 
2

There is a simple way to verify if a service is running

systemctl status service_name 

Try PostgreSQL:

systemctl status postgresql 

If you run the following command you will get a list of services:

sudo service --status-all 

To get a list of upstart jobs run this command:

sudo initctl list 
1

You can use the below command to check the list of all services.

ps aux 

To check your own service:

ps aux | grep postgres 
1

the best way is using of nmap tool in terminal. nmap is an useful tool that analyse an up system, using it's IP Address, then show all actived network services.

open terminal and use of this example :

~$ nmap 192.168.1.3/24 Starting Nmap 5.21 ( ) at 2016-05-16 22:49 IRDT Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.3 Host is up (0.00020s latency). Not shown: 994 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 23/tcp open telnet 139/tcp open netbios-ssn 445/tcp open microsoft-ds 3389/tcp open ms-term-serv 3689/tcp open rendezvous 
1

run

ps -ef | grep name-related-to-process

above command will give all the details like pid, start time about the process.

like if you want all java realted process give java or if you have name of process place the name

1

To check the status of a service on linux operating system :

//in case of super user(admin) requires sudo service {service_name} status // in case of normal user service {service_name} status 

To stop or start service

// in case of admin requires sudo service {service_name} start/stop // in case of normal user service {service_name} start/stop 

To get the list of all services along with PID :

sudo service --status-all 

You can use systemctl instead of directly calling service :

systemctl status/start/stop {service_name} 

Dirty way to find running services. (sometime it is not accurate because some custom script doesn't have |status| option)

[root@server ~]# for qw in `ls /etc/init.d/*`; do $qw status | grep -i running; done auditd (pid 1089) is running... crond (pid 1296) is running... fail2ban-server (pid 1309) is running... httpd (pid 7895) is running... messagebus (pid 1145) is running... mysqld (pid 1994) is running... master (pid 1272) is running... radiusd (pid 1712) is running... redis-server (pid 1133) is running... rsyslogd (pid 1109) is running... openssh-daemon (pid 7040) is running... 

For centos, below command worked for me (:

locate postgres | grep service 

Output:

/usr/lib/firewalld/services/postgresql.xml

/usr/lib/systemd/system/postgresql-9.3.service

sudo systemctl status postgresql-9.3.service 

for Centos 6.10 : /sbin/service serviceNAME status

for Centos 7.6 and ubuntu 18.04: systemctl status NAME.service

works for all of them: service --status-all

Based on this answer on a similar topic
I prefer: /etc/init.d/postgres status

if you are looking particularly for postgres there is a specific command called "pgrep" you can find the usage in the below mentioned article

this article provides the following details: check if postgres server is running where does postgres store all the server config how to start/stop postgres

hope this is helpful

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