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How to cleanly shut down when things go wrong
Authored by: Archange11 on Sep 10, '04 10:52:26AM

I have version 10.3.5 and I can't shutdown either. I tried the terminal commands above, and this is what I get:

Last login: Fri Sep 10 10:45:26 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
xx-xxxx-Computer:~ xxxx $ shutdown now
shutdown: NOT super-user
xx-xxxx-Computer:~ xxxx$ shutdown -r now
shutdown: NOT super-user
xx-xxxx-Computer:~ xxxx $ reboot
reboot: Operation not permitted
xx-xxxx-Computer:~ xxxx $

What is a super-user? I am in the administrator account and I am the only account on the computer. I shut down processes in the activity monitor that I knew were programs I didn't need. When I did a hard reboot and went back to the login window, I was able to shutdown and restart there.



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Superuser
Authored by: googoo on Sep 10, '04 11:41:51AM
Superuser is UNIX jargon for root user. In other words, you must execute these commands with administrative privileges. You do that by prefixing a sudo command before the command you would like to execute. For example,

sudo reboot

You will be asked for your password, and (as long as you are an administrative user) the command will execute as root. Enter man sudo for much more info.

-Mark



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