bash: service: command not found

I was having an issue running a mysql command and saw suggestions on a few issues online that suggested using the service command and it seemed to be that it was something that I should have by default.

I had been installing a few homebrew packages, so I'm not sure if that could have caused it? I have never used this command before, so I'm not entirely sure.

Attempting to run the command sudo service mysql startreturns

sudo: service: command not found

I have not got much experience using the terminal, so apologies. I saw a lot of comments suggesting that the service command is located in /usr/sbin/ and also possibly /sbin/service but I could not find it in either.

my .bash_profile is as follows

export PATH=~/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH
export PATH=/usr/local/php5/bin:$PATH
export ANDROID_HOME=$HOME/Library/Android/sdk
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/emulator
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/tools
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/tools/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools
export PATH=$PATH:/home/user/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/sbin

The two exports at the bottom were from suggestions in other questions but neither seemed to work.

Any ideas? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

1 Answer

The service command is specific to certain Linux distributions. It is not used on macOS.

If you installed MySQL through Homebrew, you can start and stop it using the commands:

brew services start mysql
brew services stop mysql