Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'How to cleanly shut down when things go wrong' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
How to cleanly shut down when things go wrong
Authored by: Anonymous on Sep 10, '04 10:52:38AM
shutdown now was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, but not what you wanted (i.e., turn the computer off). From man shutdown:

A terminate signal is then sent to init to bring the system down to single-user state (depending on above options).

What you needed to do is shutdown -h now. The '-h' switch causes shutdown to exec a halt (see also '-r' for a reboot).

If you do a man reboot you will see the following "guidance"

Normally, the shutdown(8) utility is used when the system needs to be halted or restarted, giving users advance warning of their impending doom and cleanly terminating specific programs.

The implication is that shutdown is preferred to reboot (or halt) since it notifies logged in users. If you are the only one using your machine then I guess either is fine.

Remember, the man pages are your friends...

[ Reply to This | # ]

How to cleanly shut down when things go wrong
Authored by: aqsalter on Sep 11, '04 03:55:34AM
Is there an easy way to get back up from single user mode? If so you could just do a shutdown now and then excute the command that would bring it back up again.... Viola! Quick reboot! ;)

[ Reply to This | # ]