On Sun 10 Dec 2023 at 13:39:50 (-0700), Charles Curley wrote: > On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 14:17:36 -0600 > David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: > > > Why is the service loaded, enabled and enabled then? Don't you need > > to disable or mask it? Presumably it sits there, dead, all day > > normally, and pops up at an appropriate time. > > As I understand things, start and stop are for immediate changes. > enable and disable are for boot time. So the service is turned off > until I either start it up again manually or reboot the computer. > > Then there's masking, which is a whole nother can of lawyers. And a > slew of other states. See Table 1. is-enabled output, in man systemctl.
I think it might be worth googling and reading "three levels of off" (with the quotes). 1. You can stop a service. That simply terminates the running instance of the service and does little else. If due to some form of activation (such as manual activation, socket activation, bus activation, activation by system boot or activation by hardware plug) the service is requested again afterwards it will be started. Stopping a service is hence a very simple, temporary and superficial operation. Cheers, David.