Find Services Needing Restart After Patches

After security packages are applied, you need to see which services still need restarts.

Command

needrestart -b | sed -n 's/^NEEDRESTART-SVC: //p'

Before you run this

Risk: safe. Do not restart services blindly from this output; coordinate impact and maintenance windows.

Expected output

systemctl restart commands for services that need to load patched libraries.

System impact

Nothing changes. needrestart prints batch-mode restart findings and sed extracts service restart commands.

When to use it

Use after OpenSSL, libc, kernel, or web stack updates to plan service restarts and reboot decisions.

When not to use it

Do not restart services blindly from this output; coordinate impact and maintenance windows.

Recovery / rollback

No undo needed because this command only reports restart needs.

Watch this command run

Example output from a temporary Linux lab

This example uses disposable sample files and sanitized output so you can inspect the shape of the result before touching a real system.

demo@lab:~$

$ needrestart -b

NEEDRESTART-VER: 3.6
NEEDRESTART-KCUR: 6.8.0-60-generic
NEEDRESTART-KEXP: 6.8.0-63-generic
NEEDRESTART-KSTA: 3
NEEDRESTART-SVC: systemctl restart nginx.service
NEEDRESTART-SVC: systemctl restart ssh.service

$ needrestart -b | sed -n 's/^NEEDRESTART-SVC: //p'

systemctl restart nginx.service
systemctl restart ssh.service

View reproducible demo details

This page shows the sanitized shell transcript and the setup steps needed to reproduce the example.