HOSTNAMECTL(1)hostnamectlHOSTNAMECTL(1)NAMEhostnamectl - Control the system hostname
SYNOPSIShostnamectl [OPTIONS...] {COMMAND}
DESCRIPTIONhostnamectl 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:
-h, --help
Prints a short help text and exits.
--version
Prints a short version string and exits.
--no-ask-password
Do not query the user for authentication for privileged operations.
-P, --privileged
Acquire privileges via PolicyKit before executing the operation.
-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 a remote system.
--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.
The following commands are understood:
status
Show current system hostname and related information.
set-hostname NAME
Set the system hostname to NAME. 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 to 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 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 to 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", "watch", as
well as the special chassis types "vm" and "container" for
virtualized systems that lack an immediate physical chassis.
Pass an empty string 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 208HOSTNAMECTL(1)
