UPSDRVCTL(8) NUT Manual UPSDRVCTL(8)

upsdrvctl - Network UPS Tools driver controller

upsdrvctl -h

upsdrvctl [OPTIONS] {start | stop | shutdown | status} [ups]

upsdrvctl [OPTIONS] {list | -l} [ups]

upsdrvctl [OPTIONS] -c COMMAND [ups]

upsdrvctl provides a uniform interface for controlling your UPS drivers. You should use upsdrvctl command instead of direct calls to the drivers whenever possible.

When used properly, upsdrvctl lets you maintain identical startup scripts across multiple systems with different UPS configurations.


Warning

For operating systems with service management frameworks, such as Solaris/illumos SMF or Linux systemd, the upsdrvsvcctl(8) may be a better choice.

In fact, service instances prepared by nut-driver-enumerator(8) based on contents of your ups.conf(5) file and automatically maintained by the respective framework can conflict with manual execution of drivers. In this case, upsdrvctl would emit a warning in NUT builds with that capability (can be silenced by exporting a NUT_QUIET_INIT_NDE_WARNING environment variable with any value).

You may be required to stop service units (if used) and run driver programs directly rather than via upsdrvctl for troubleshooting, e.g. to facilitate debug log collection or test any custom builds of drivers without conflict with a normally running packaged instance.

-h

Display the help text.

-r directory

If starting a driver, this value will direct it to chroot(2) into directory. This can be useful when securing systems.

This may be set in the ups.conf(5) with the chroot directive in the global section.

-t

Enable testing mode. This also enables debug mode. Testing mode makes upsdrvctl display the actions it would execute without actually doing them. Use this to test out your configuration without actually doing anything to your UPS drivers.

This may be helpful when defining the sdorder directive in your ups.conf(5) section for the device.

-u username

If starting a driver, this value will direct it to setuid(2) to the user id associated with username.

If the driver is started as root without specifying this value, it will use the username that was compiled into the binary. This defaults to nobody (if not otherwise configured), which is far from ideal.

This may be set in ups.conf(5) with the user directive in the global section.

-D

Raise the debug level. Use this multiple times for additional details.

Note that this does not preclude the upsdrvctl tool from exiting after its job is done (however an explicit -F option does).

Also note that this option alone modifies the debug verbosity of the tool, but not of the drivers it launches. See the additional -d option for that.

-d

Pass the selected debug level from upsdrvctl to launched drivers.

Note that by default for NUT daemons, enabled debugging means running in foreground mode; you can specify -B additionally to avoid that.

-F

Driver will run in the foreground (not fork away from the upsdrvctl process), regardless of debugging settings. It would also keep the tool program itself foregrounded with driver daemons running as its children (in case of a single driver startup, it would not even fork).

It would also not wait for drivers to complete initialization, so upsdrvctl will warn about such situations.

Specify twice (-FF or -F -F) to save the driver PID file even in this mode (not saved by default when staying in foreground).

-B

Drivers will run in the background, regardless of debugging settings, as set by -D and passed-through by -d options.

-l

Alias for list command.

upsdrvctl supports three active commands — start, stop and shutdown. It also supports passing requests to running drivers using -c COMMAND syntax, similar to that in some other daemons. A couple of helper commands are also available — list and status.

They all can take an optional argument which is a UPS name from ups.conf(5). Without that argument, they operate on every UPS that is currently configured.


Note

upsdrvctl can not manage devices not listed in ups.conf (such as test drivers started with -s TMP option).

start

Start the UPS driver(s). In case of failure to start within maxstartdelay time-frame, further attempts may be executed by using the maxretry and retrydelay values. Conversely, the nowait global option can be used, especially to speed up parallel start of many drivers.

See ups.conf(5) about these options. Built-in defaults are: maxstartdelay=75 (sec), maxretry=1 (meaning one attempt at starting), retrydelay=5 (sec).

stop

Stop the UPS driver(s). This does not send commands to the UPS.

shutdown

Command the UPS driver(s) to run their shutdown sequence. This assumes that the driver is no longer running, and starts a fresh instance via drivername -k. It is intended to be used as the last step in system shutdown, after the filesystems are no longer mounted rw. Drivers are stopped according to their sdorder value — see ups.conf(5).

Warning

This will probably power off your computers, so don’t play around with this option. Only use it when your systems are prepared to lose power.


Note

Refer to ups.conf(5) for using the nowait parameter. It can be overridden by NUT_IGNORE_NOWAIT environment variable (e.g. used to work around certain issues with systemd otherwise).

list

Without a further argument, report all currently known device configuration names to stdout, one per line. With an argument, also try to report that name, but exit with an error code if that name is not known.

Note

The tool would exit with an error if ups.conf file is not found, readable, or does not define any device sections (whose names are reported here and managed in other commands).


Note

The tool name and NUT version banner line is also printed to stdout before any other processing. This can be suppressed by NUT_QUIET_INIT_BANNER environment variable (exported by caller and empty or "true"):

:; NUT_QUIET_INIT_BANNER=true upsdrvctl list
dummy
UPS1
UPS2

status

Similar to list, but reports more information — also the driver name, the PID if it is running, and result of a signal probe to check it is responding. The NUT_QUIET_INIT_BANNER suppression can be helpful for scripted parsing. If there is anything to print (at least one device is known), the first line of status report would be the heading with column names: 
:; NUT_QUIET_INIT_BANNER=true upsdrvctl status
UPSNAME              UPSDRV  RUNNING PF_PID  S_RESPONSIVE    S_PID   S_STATUS
dummy             dummy-ups  N/A     -3      NOT_RESPONSIVE  N/A
eco650           usbhid-ups  RUNNING 3559207 RESPONSIVE      3559207 "OL"
UPS2              dummy-ups  RUNNING 31455   RESPONSIVE      31455   "OL BOOST"

Values are TAB-separated, but UPSNAME and UPSDRV may be padded by spaces on the right and on the left respectively. Any complex string values would be encased in double-quotes.

Fields reported (PF_* = according to PID file, if any; S_* = via socket protocol):

UPSNAME

driver section configuration name

UPSDRV

driver program name per ups.conf

RUNNING

RUNNING if PF_PID or S_PID is valid, STOPPED if at least one PID value was parsed but none was found running with a correct program name; N/A if no PID file/socket reply or failed to parse. First the PID file is consulted, but it may be absent either due to command-line parameters of daemons, or due to platform (WIN32). If no PID value was found and confirmed this way, we fall back to checking the PID reported via protocol (if available and different).

PF_PID

PID of driver according to PID file (if any), or some negative values upon errors (as defined in common.c) including an absent PID file, invalid contents, or unsupported platform for this mechanism (e.g. WIN32)

S_RESPONSIVE

RESPONSIVE if PING/PONG during socket protocol session setup succeeded; NOT_RESPONSIVE otherwise

S_PID

PID of driver according to GETPID active query, or N/A if the query failed

S_STATUS

Quoted value of ups.status variable

This mode does not discover drivers that are not in ups.conf (e.g. started manually for experiments with many -x CLI options).

-c command

Send command to the background process as a signal. Valid commands are:

dump

tell the driver(s) to dump currently known state information to their stdout (if attached anywhere)

reload

reread configuration files, ignoring modified settings which can not be applied "on the fly"

reload-or-error

reread configuration files, ignoring but counting changed values which require a driver restart (can not be changed on the fly), and return a success/fail code based on that count, so the caller can decide the fate of the currently running driver instance

reload-or-exit

reread configuration files, exiting the old driver process if it encounters modified settings which can not be applied "on the fly" (so caller like systemd can launch another copy of the driver)

exit

tell the currently running driver instance to just exit (so an external caller like the new driver instance, or the systemd or SMF frameworks would start another copy)

If the upsdrvctl was launched to remain in memory and manage NUT driver processes, it can receive supported signals and pass them to those drivers.

NUT_DEBUG_LEVEL sets default debug verbosity if no -D arguments were provided on command line, but does not request that the daemon runs in foreground mode.

NUT_CONFPATH is the path name of the directory that contains ups.conf and other configuration files. If this variable is not set, upsdrvctl (and the drivers) use a built-in default, which is often /usr/local/ups/etc.

NUT_ALTPIDPATH is the path name of the directory in which upsd and drivers store .pid files. If this variable is not set, upsd and drivers use either NUT_STATEPATH if set, or ALTPIDPATH if set, or otherwise the built-in default STATEPATH.

upsdrvctl will return a nonzero exit code if it encounters an error while performing the desired operation. This will also happen if a driver takes longer than the maxstartdelay period to enter the background.

upsdrvsvcctl(8), nut-driver-enumerator(8), nutupsdrv(8), upsd(8), ups.conf(5)

The NUT (Network UPS Tools) home page: https://www.networkupstools.org/historic/v2.8.3/

05/29/2025 Network UPS Tools 2.8.3