The native jls/jexec commands only work for jails that are "up". If an iocage jail is stopped, it won't show in jls
.
So yes, for iocage jails, you want to use iocage exec
and iocage list
so that you have visibility of all iocage jails that are out there. It offers some additional advantages, e.g. it will automatically start a jail if needed when you do iocage exec
, it will show some properties and metadata that is unknown (irrelevant) to the native jails, etc...
Note that for legacy warden jails, there are the equivalent commands, e.g. warden list
, warden start
, etc... but almost nobody uses them, because warden is very well integrated in the legacy GUI and the new UI is still playing catch up. ;)