Bug 2479961

Summary:	init with a runlevel number just prints the weird message "Excess arguments." and nothing happens
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Albert Flügel <af>
Component:	systemd	Assignee:	systemd-maint
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	44	CC:	daan.j.demeyer, fedoraproject, lnykryn, msekleta, suraj.ghimire7, systemd-maint, vmihalko, yuwatana, zbyszek
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Regression
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	systemd-261~rc3-1.fc45	Doc Type:	---
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2026-06-04 18:08:03 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Albert Flügel 2026-05-19 19:28:28 UTC

In Fedora 42 a graceful reboot could be done with init 6, poweroff was init 0 and this is likely used in quite a lot of scripts worldwide

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. As root enter init 0

Actual Results:
Output: Excess arguments.
Sometimes (unclear, why), there is no output.
In any case, nothing more happens

Expected Results:
The systemd operated services etc. are terminated and the system reboots or powers down

Additional Information:
i did not find any related hint in the release notes, neither in those for fedora 43 nor 44

Comment 1 Fedora Update System 2026-06-04 16:52:00 UTC

FEDORA-2026-4280f7beb8 (systemd-261~rc3-1.fc45) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 45.
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-4280f7beb8

Comment 2 Fedora Update System 2026-06-04 18:08:03 UTC

FEDORA-2026-4280f7beb8 (systemd-261~rc3-1.fc45) has been pushed to the Fedora 45 stable repository.
If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 3 Albert Flügel 2026-06-05 09:29:08 UTC

Installed the systemd-261~rc3-1.fc45 on Fedora 44 (what i consider very experimental, however it worked) and now i get:
Program 'systemd' called as 'init' with a legacy telinit command.
Call shutdown(8), reboot(8), or systemctl(1) instead.
So this is the "solution" ?
The maintainers still prefer to break i don't know how many scripts worldwide instead of keeping a few lines of code ? But the maintenance of the above error message is no effort or what ?

Comment 4 Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek 2026-06-07 14:35:23 UTC

It's not a "few lines of code". The init binary would hand of the command to systemctl, which would actually do the call. And calling init like this was by itself a compatibility protocol, because the official way was to call telinit. Upstream decided to drop those compat layers to simplify the implementation.

Comment 5 Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek 2026-06-07 14:36:38 UTC

And yes, the new code is a few lines of code and does not require any maintenance, because it just prints a fixed string. I understand that this is not the answer you were looking for, but at least there's a clean and (I hope) informative error.

Comment 6 Albert Flügel 2026-06-07 15:06:07 UTC

These are the release notes:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/release-notes/
(btw any other link than to "latest" e.g. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/44/release-notes/ found by google is dead)
I don't find any hint to this breaking change in systemd anywhere. System administrators who manage automation should be aware of such things beforehand, rather than stumbling upon them later on

Comment 7 Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek 2026-06-07 15:28:14 UTC

Not every fringe compat interface can be documented in the distribution release notes… There is 28k packages in Fedora, so if we tried to describe every change in every package, we'd be doing nothing else but writing this documentation.