HOSTNAMECTL(1) hostnamectl HOSTNAMECTL(1)NAME
hostnamectl - Control the system hostname
SYNOPSIS
hostnamectl [OPTIONS...] {COMMAND}
DESCRIPTION
hostnamectl may be used to query and change the system hostname and
related settings.
This tool distinguishes three different hostnames: the high-level
"pretty" hostname which might include all kinds of special characters
(e.g. "Lennart's Laptop"), the static hostname which is used to
initialize the kernel hostname at boot (e.g. "lennarts-laptop"), and
the transient hostname which might be assigned temporarily due to
network configuration and might revert back to the static hostname if
network connectivity is lost and is only temporarily written to the
kernel hostname (e.g. "dhcp-47-11").
Note that the pretty hostname has little restrictions on the characters
used, while the static and transient hostnames are limited to the
usually accepted characters of Internet domain names.
The static hostname is stored in /etc/hostname, see hostname(5) for
more information. The pretty hostname, chassis type, and icon name are
stored in /etc/machine-info, see machine-id(5).
OPTIONS
The following options are understood:
--no-ask-password
Do not query the user for authentication for privileged operations.
-P, --privileged
Acquire privileges via PolicyKit before executing the operation.
--static, --transient, --pretty
If status is used (or no explicit command is given) and one of
those fields is given, hostnamectl will print out just this
selected hostname.
If used with set-hostname, only the selected hostname(s) will be
updated. When more than one of those options is used, all the
specified hostnames will be updated.
-H, --host=
Execute the operation remotely. Specify a hostname, or username and
hostname separated by "@", to connect to. This will use SSH to talk
to the remote machine manager instance.
-h, --help
Print a short help text and exit.
--version
Print a short version string and exit.
The following commands are understood:
status
Show current system hostname and related information.
set-hostname [NAME]
Set the system hostname. By default, this will alter the pretty,
the static, and the transient hostname alike; however, if one or
more of --static, --transient, --pretty are used, only the selected
hostnames are changed. If the pretty hostname is being set, and
static or transient are being set as well, the specified hostname
will be simplified in regards to the character set used before the
latter are updated. This is done by replacing spaces with "-" and
removing special characters. This ensures that the pretty and the
static hostname are always closely related while still following
the validity rules of the specific name. This simplification of the
hostname string is not done if only the transient and/or static
host names are set, and the pretty host name is left untouched.
Pass the empty string "" as the hostname to reset the selected
hostnames to their default (usually "localhost").
set-icon-name [NAME]
Set the system icon name. The icon name is used by some graphical
applications to visualize this host. The icon name should follow
the Icon Naming Specification[1]. Pass an empty string to this
operation to reset the icon name to the default value, which is
determined from chassis type (see below) and possibly other
parameters.
set-chassis [TYPE]
Set the chassis type. The chassis type is used by some graphical
applications to visualize the host or alter user interaction.
Currently, the following chassis types are defined: "desktop",
"laptop", "server", "tablet", "handset", as well as the special
chassis types "vm" and "container" for virtualized systems that
lack an immediate physical chassis. Pass an empty string to this
operation to reset the chassis type to the default value which is
determined from the firmware and possibly other parameters.
EXIT STATUS
On success, 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise.
SEE ALSOsystemd(1), hostname(1), hostname(5), machine-info(5), systemctl(1),
systemd-hostnamed.service(8)NOTES
1. Icon Naming Specification
http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-latest.html
systemd 212HOSTNAMECTL(1)