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reboot vs shutdown -r now
Authored by: TigerKR on Mar 13, '04 10:19:43AM

I used to think that the preferred command for instant restarting from the command line was "shutdown -r now" as opposed to "reboot". But for the searching I have patience for right now, the omnigoogle says that the two commands are functionally equivalent.

I guess that will save some keystrokes for me in my remote administration capacities.



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reboot vs shutdown -r now
Authored by: PygmySurfer on Mar 14, '04 08:06:27AM

If the OS X man pages are correct, shutdown -r and reboot are definitely NOT equivalent. The reboot command seems to just flush the filesystem cache, send first a SIGTERM and then a SIGKILL to all processes, and reboot.

Shutdown warns users, sends a SIGTERM to the 'init' process to bring the system to Single-User mode, and then calls reboot.

Be careful not to confuse the OS X (and Solaris, and probably other UNIX-like OSes) reboot command with the Linux reboot command. On Linux, reboot calls shutdown, thus switching to the proper run-level, executing the shutdown scripts, etc. Looks like Linux implemented it backwards. :)



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