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When I do systemctl stop service on a stopped or failed service, it returns 0 and no output. I need to know whether it was running before I call this.
Calling systemctl status before stopping is not an option: it increases running time and introduces race conditions. Both reasons are important in my case.
If killing your service with a TERM signal is an appropriate way to stop it, you can use
systemctl kill --fail service
instead of
systemctl stop service
This will exit with code 0 if the service was running and killed, 1 if the service wasn’t running.
stopstops a service andstatuswould tell you "whether it was running". Are you looking for a "stop only if it's already running" command? Or do you want "stop" to return different exit codes if the service was running and was successfully stopped? (In which case this may turn into a feature request of systemd)stopto tell me what it has really done. A special exit code would be the best solution. Although a message in the output is acceptable too.