[PATCH] Shutdown cooloff feature

[Aristedes Maniatis]

On 3/01/10 11:28 AM, martinko wrote:
> Robert Watson wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Xin LI wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not sure if anyone would find this useful:
>>
>> Along similar lines, if we're looking at frequent admin errors: I've
>> noticed an increasing number of people using "reboot" rather than
>> "shutdown -r NOW" on the basis that on Linux (and perhaps other
>> systems), reboot gives a clean application shutdown. I wonder if we
>> should be making a similar change -- a lot of people may be risky data
>> corruption/loss due to unclean application shutdown as a result of that
>> misunderstanding.
>
> Sorry for a too late note, I'm just catching up, however ..
>
> IIRC Solaris for instance differentiate similarly to FreeBSD between
> shutdown, reboot and others. So we're not alone. :) And I've always
> considered it a good thing -- shutdown is clean/correct and higher level
> then reboot & co.
>
> OT: I've noticed that PC-BSD has been shipping for ages with reboot
> instead of shutdown. That is default in KDE and comes from Linux.
>


Adding another 'me too'. I've been working with various Unices for 15 years now and it has only been this thread that brought my attention to the evils of 'reboot'. I've always typed 'reboot' since I was worried that I'd accidentally type 'shutdown -R now' by mistake (or some similar typo) which would shutdown the box instead of reboot it, and then I'd need to spend the next 4 hours of my life traveling to a data centre. And 'reboot' was fewer letters to type.

Why would an operating system have an unclean shutdown command at all? It would be more direct to just have a 'rand' command which writes random data to 5 random sectors on disk... :-)  And surely if a process is stuck, it should be killed individually? Perhaps if this command is really needed it could be buried under "reboot -f" or something like that.

For what it is worth, OSX does a clean graceful reboot with 'reboot'.

Ari
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