Difference between Systemctl and service command
With borrowing from this answer:
service
is an "high-level" command used forstart
,restart,
stop
andstatus
services in different Unixes and Linuxes. Depending on the "lower-level" service manager, service redirects on different binaries.For example, on CentOS 7 it redirects to systemctl, while on CentOS 6 it directly called the relative
/etc/init.d
script. On the other hand, in older Ubuntu releases it redirects to upstart.
service
is adequate for basic service management, while directly callingsystemctl
give greater control options.
Moreover, systemctl
runs services file from this path: /lib/systemd/
service
operates on the files in /etc/init.d and was used in conjunction with the old init system. systemctl
operates on the files in /lib/systemd. If there is a file for your service in /lib/systemd it will use that first and if not it will fall back to the file in /etc/init.d.
Also If you are using OS like ubuntu-14.04 only service command will be available.
So if systemctl is available ,it will be better to use it