NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | PARAMETERS | SYSTEM FILE PRECEDENCE | EXAMPLES | DEPRECATED PARAMETERS | FILES | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COLOPHON |
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SYSCTL(8) System Administration SYSCTL(8)
sysctl - configure kernel parameters at runtime
sysctl [option ...] variable[=value] ... sysctl -p file-or-regexp ...
sysctl is used to modify kernel parameters at runtime. The parameters available are those listed under /proc/sys/. Procfs is required for sysctl support in Linux. You can use sysctl to both read and write sysctl data.
variable The name of a key to read from. An example is kernel.ostype. The '/' separator is also accepted in place of a '.'. variable=value To set a key, use the form variable=value where variable is the key and value is the value to set it to. If the value contains quotes or characters which are parsed by the shell, you may need to enclose the value in double quotes. -n, --values Use this option to disable printing of the key name when printing values. -e, --ignore Use this option to ignore errors about unknown keys. -N, --names Use this option to only print the names. It may be useful with shells that have programmable completion. -q, --quiet Use this option to not display the values set to stdout. -w, --write Force all arguments to be write arguments and print an error if they cannot be parsed this way. -p[FILE], --load[=FILE] Load in sysctl settings from the file specified or /etc/sysctl.conf if none given. Specifying - as filename means reading data from standard input. Using this option will mean arguments to sysctl are files, which are read in the order they are specified. The file argument may be specified as regular expression. -a, --all Display all values currently available. --deprecated Include deprecated parameters to --all values listing. -b, --binary Print value without new line. --system Load settings from all system configuration files. See the SYSTEM FILE PRECEDENCE section below. -r, --pattern pattern Only apply settings that match pattern. The pattern uses extended regular expression syntax. -A Alias of -a -d Alias of -h -f Alias of -p -X Alias of -a -o Does nothing, exists for BSD compatibility. -x Does nothing, exists for BSD compatibility. -h, --help Display help text and exit. -V, --version Display version information and exit.
When using the --system option, sysctl will read files from directories in the following list in given order from top to bottom. Once a file of a given filename is loaded, any file of the same name in subsequent directories is ignored. /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf /run/sysctl.d/*.conf /usr/local/lib/sysctl.d/*.conf /usr/lib/sysctl.d/*.conf /lib/sysctl.d/*.conf /etc/sysctl.conf All configuration files are sorted in lexicographic order, regardless of the directory they reside in. Configuration files can either be completely replaced (by having a new configuration file with the same name in a directory of higher priority) or partially replaced (by having a configuration file that is ordered later).
/sbin/sysctl -a /sbin/sysctl -n kernel.hostname /sbin/sysctl -w kernel.domainname="example.com" /sbin/sysctl -p/etc/sysctl.conf /sbin/sysctl -a --pattern forward /sbin/sysctl -a --pattern forward$ /sbin/sysctl -a --pattern 'net.ipv4.conf.(eth|wlan)0.arp' /sbin/sysctl --pattern '^net.ipv6' --system
The base_reachable_time and retrans_time are deprecated. The sysctl command does not allow changing values of these parameters. Users who insist to use deprecated kernel interfaces should push values to /proc file system by other means. For example: echo 256 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/neigh/eth0/base_reachable_time
/proc/sys /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf /run/sysctl.d/*.conf /usr/local/lib/sysctl.d/*.conf /usr/lib/sysctl.d/*.conf /lib/sysctl.d/*.conf /etc/sysctl.conf
proc(5), sysctl.conf(5), regex(7)
George Staikos ⟨staikos@0wned.org⟩
Please send bug reports to ⟨procps@freelists.org⟩.
This page is part of the procps-ng (/proc filesystem utilities)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/blob/master/Documentation/bugs.md⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps.git⟩ on 2024-06-14. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2024-06-04.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
procps-ng 2023-08-19 SYSCTL(8)
Pages that refer to this page: perfalloc(1), pmdaperfevent(1), coredump.conf(5), lxc.container.conf(5), proc(5), sysctl.conf(5), sysctl.d(5), flowtop(8), systemd-coredump(8), systemd-sysctl.service(8)