List of available services

On Debian jessie try: service --status-all.

It is in the sysvinit-utils package.


Wheezy uses SysV init, and all the services are controlled with special shell scripts in /etc/init.d, so ls /etc/init.d will list them. These files also contain a description of the service at the top, and the directory contains a README.

Some but not all of them have a .sh suffix, you should leave that off when using, eg., update-rc.d.


service --status-all

Will list all services with a status code, being stopped or off (-), started or on (+), or unknown (?), which means no status code section in their init.d script. Not just running services.