mjhjmtu

I check service status with systemctl status service-name.

By default, I see few rows only, so I add -n50 to see more.

Sometimes, I want to see full log, from start. It could have 1000s of rows.

Now, I check it with -n10000 but that doesn't look like neat solution.

Is there an option to check full systemd service log similar to less command?

Just use the journalctl command, as in:

journalctl -u service-name.service

Or, to see only log messages for the current boot:

journalctl -u service-name.service -b

For things named <something>.service, you can actually just use <something>, as in:

journalctl -u service-name

But for other sorts of units (sockets, targets, timers, etc), you need to be explicit.

In the above commands, the -u flag is short for --unit, and specifies the name of the unit in which you're interested. -b is short for --boot, and restricts the output to only the current boot so that you don't see lots of older messages. See the journalctl man page for more information.

systemctl can include the complete output of its status listing, without truncation., by adding the -l flag:

systemctl -l status service-name

-l: don't truncate entries with ellipses (...)

--no-pager can be added to avoid invoking a pager when the output is an interactive terminal.