Show Systemd status output without pager

Question

By default Systemd shows service status output in less, which is not only annoying in interactive terminals, but may also interrupt scripts that display a service status (because you need to exit from the pager before the script can continue).

I tried changing/unsetting $PAGER and changing default less parameters ($LESS), but that didn't seem to have any effect.

How do I get rid of systemctl paging?

Answer 1

systemctl can be called with a parameter --no-pager to avoid this behavior. However, that won't help when you're using the service command instead of systemctl (for portable scripts). As an alternative you can set the environment variable $SYSTEMD_PAGER to an empty value.

 export SYSTEMD_PAGER=

Setting the environment variable $PAGER to an empty value would also work, but would likely affect other applications as well, so I wouldn't recommend that.