Re: APM/shutdown/powering off

[Erik Osterholm <Erik_Osterholm_(_at_)_ieee_(_dot_)_org>]

On Sun, May 06, 2001 at 09:16:11AM +0100, Alfred Breull mentioned:
> At 21:12 05.05.01 -0400, Nick Holland wrote:
> >I have found 'reboot' and 'halt' less prone to stupid errors like
> >that.  They are "instant" shutdown -- no warnings, no time delay is
> >given (and as far as I can tell from looking at the man pages, that is
> >the only difference between halt/reboot and shutdown).
> 
> Well, I enjoyed your story more than you when you were in that 
> situation. :) However, I see several differences from both, the 
> man pages and when running 'halt -p' or 'shutdown -hp now':
> 
> [2] Shutdown runs rc.shutdown which halt doesn't (I'm just a newbie,
> so, please, correct me). As far as I understood, you might rather 
> enjoy a smoothe shutdown, at least, when running servers on that box.

>From man halt:

The halt and reboot utilities flush the file system cache to
disk, run the system shutdown script, send all running processes a
SIGTERM (and subsequently a SIGKILL), and, respectively, halt or
restart the system.
The action is logged, including entering a shutdown record into the
login accounting file. 

In fact, if you read the man page for shutdown, it states that the -h
script will actually executes halt.  The -r script, respectively
executes reboot.

Erik