How to manage services in Linux and FreeBSD

It is very important to know how to manage services in Linux/Unix systems, in order not to reboot the entire system when not necesarry.

In this article I will show you how to start, stop, restart a service in the most used Linux distros and FreeBSD and will use the sshd service as a sample:

How to start, stop, restart a service in Fedora/openSUSE/CentOS:

Syntax: # service name {start,stop,restart}

Stop sshd: # service sshd stop
AND # /etc/init.d/sshd stop

Start sshd: # service sshd start
AND # /etc/init.d/sshd start

Restart sshd: # service sshd restart
AND # /etc/init.d/sshd restart

How to start, stop, restart a service in Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint:

Stop ssh: # /etc/init.d/ssh stop

Start ssh: # /etc/init.d/ssh start

Restart ssh: # /etc/init.d/ssh restart

How to start, stop, restart a service in FreeBSD/PCBSD:

Syntax: # service name {start,stop,restart}

Stop sshd: # service sshd stop
AND # /etc/rc.d/sshd stop

Start sshd: # service sshd start
AND # /etc/rc.d/sshd start

Restart sshd: # service sshd restart
AND # /etc/rc.d/sshd restart

Yo can find out if a service is running or not with ps or /path/to/service status:

$ ps aux | grep ssh

OR: /etc/*.d/ssh status