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Shutdown vs Halt
Authored by: _merlin on Feb 10, '02 05:28:14PM

Under Mac OS X, the shut down command shuts down the window server and all the daemons. The halt command shuts the system down completely. Unless you have modified your system radically, "sudo shutdown now" will in fact drop you down to single-user mode.

The reason people discourage the use of this command is that it rather rudely kills GUI applications. They don't get a chance to clean up, save preferences, etc. It's perfectly OK to execute it if you're logged in on the console (>console with no password at the login prompt).

And there's no harm in using exit to return to multi-user mode. It's almost as good as a reboot. The only difference is your VM files won't be deleted and re-created.



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Shutdown vs Halt
Authored by: thatch on Feb 10, '02 06:21:41PM

sudo shutdown now has always worked for me and does give me single user mode. But one observation recently is that after exit, the system really stalls at initializing network from roughly 10 to 30 seconds. My normal startup doesn't do that but slightly stalls at configuring network, getting network time and starting firewall. Maybe that's just on my machine, G4 867, 896 Ram, OS 10.1.2.



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