33

I know how to enable/disable lingering with loginctl.

But up to now I found no way to query the status of a user.

I want to know: Is lingering enable for user foo?

How can I access this information?

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
52

You can show a list of lingering users with

ls /var/lib/systemd/linger

because

loginctl enable-linger $USER
loginctl disable-linger $USER

do the equivalent of

touch /var/lib/systemd/linger/$USER
rm /var/lib/systemd/linger/$USER
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2
  • 2
    Note: folder /var/lib/systemd/linger does not exist until you « linger » your first user
    – Jocelyn delalande
    May 18, 2020 at 14:48
  • @Jocelyndelalande On Debian unstable I got that linger directory, even though it is empty, I never had a lingering user (95% sure), nor is it part of a package.
    – Robert Siemer
    Jan 25 at 22:15
18

loginctl user-status foo shows linger status.

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1
  • 3
    I am unsure if this really works. Some minutes ago this printed a tree for a test-user which has not lingering enabled. Now, some minutes later, the output is "Failed to get user: No user '1003' known or logged in". I will use the solution from Markus Kuhn (check if file /var/lib/systemd/linger/$USER exists)
    – guettli
    Aug 15, 2017 at 9:05
12

The best I found for check it in scripts (programmatically):

loginctl show-user "$USER" --property=Linger | grep -q 'yes'
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2
  • Why not use this: "check the existance of /var/lib/systemd/linger"?
    – guettli
    Jan 4, 2019 at 9:30
  • 6
    Because it's more subject to changes without notice.
    – Xorax
    Jan 8, 2019 at 14:31

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