Re: How do I permanently disable unattended downloads of software/security updates?
On Wed, Jun 02, 2021 at 07:33:32PM +0300, Reco wrote:
> Hi.
>
> On Wed, Jun 02, 2021 at 06:27:45PM +0200, Stella Ashburne wrote:
> > Output of systemctl list-timers
> >
> >
> > NEXT LEFT LAST PASSED
> > Wed 2021-06-02 16:24:55 GMT 4min 34s left n/a n/a
> > Thu 2021-06-03 00:00:00 GMT 7h left Wed 2021-06-02 16:10:36 GMT 9min ago
> > Thu 2021-06-03 00:00:00 GMT 7h left Wed 2021-06-02 16:10:36 GMT 9min ago
> > Thu 2021-06-03 00:39:22 GMT 8h left Wed 2021-06-02 16:10:36 GMT 9min ago
> > Thu 2021-06-03 06:40:44 GMT 14h left Wed 2021-06-02 07:43:04 GMT 8h ago
> > Thu 2021-06-03 07:30:43 GMT 15h left Thu 2021-06-03 00:10:06 GMT 7h left
> >
> > 6 timers listed.
> > Pass --all to see loaded but inactive timers, too.
>
> The most important parts of "systemctl list-timers" (your problem
> considered) are UNIT and ACTIVATES columns, and your result lacks them
> for some reason.
The designers of systemctl made some odd choices. They drop you into a
weird interactive mode by default, and expect you to be willing and able
to scroll around to see the fields of this report. Worst of all is that
you may not even *know* that you're supposed to do this.
If you run "systemctl list-timers" in a terminal, you may (or may not)
notice a few things:
1) You're placed in a pager, even if the output has many fewer lines than
your terminal does. How can you tell you're in a pager? There's a
prompt at the bottom of the screen. You may recognize it if you've
had enough experience with reading man pages.
2) There are two tremendously wide date/time fields visible, with redundant
day-of-week and timezone fields, but not the actually *important*
information like what's going to happen at that time.
3) There are some reverse-video > signs on the right hand side of the report.
What you're expected to do is use the Right and Left arrow keys on your
keyboard (assuming they're correctly mapped in your terminal emulator's
terminfo entries) to scroll back and forth to see the other fields. Which
you're supposed to guess exist.
If for some reason you would simply like to see all of the information on
the screen at once, the way a Unix user would *expect* a command like this
to work, you need to redirect or pipe systemctl's output so that it isn't
going to a terminal.
systemctl list-timers | cat
Of course, this is still ugly as sin, because the designers of systemctl
don't understand that terminals are 80 characters wide, always and forever.
They just dump a bunch of longer-than-140-character lines and let them
wrap as they will. Well, at least the information is there, even if it's
hard to read.
Those wide timestamps are just ridiculous, aren't they? And why isn't
the unit name (the most important thing) shown first? Or even *at all*
by default?
Anyway, I suspect that the OP might find some useful information from
this command:
systemctl list-timers | grep apt
Reply to: