shutdown computer after the halt command

[Adam Vande More]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Devin Teske <dteske at vicor.com> wrote:

> There's no technical reason to avoid using halt directly other than the
> fact that shutdown sends a message to connected users while halt does
> not.
> --
> Devin
>
> P.S. I welcome the rebuttle as a learning experience if the above is not
> 100% accurate and true (but be-warned... I went around the office
> polling _really_ old UNIX hands before making the above statement).
>

I used to believe that until I was shown I was wrong.  The easiest way to
see you're wrong is to drop to ttyv0  then do one of each like a reboot then
a shutdown -r now.  In the latter case, you'll notice /etc/rc.d/ and
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/ stop scripts being processed but not so in the former.
In both types of shutdowns, everything *should* exit cleanly but processes
are terminated with different signals and certain types of applications
really need the full rc stop script to end cleanly like HAST and CARP for
example.

shutdown -r/p is a really good habit to form.

FWIW, someone also stated reboot on Linux behaves like shutdown -r now so
that I sure contributes to the confusion.

-- 
Adam Vande More