Shutting Down the FreeBSD System

As mentioned in Chapter 2, “Installing FreeBSD,” it is very important that you always shut down a FreeBSD system (or any other UNIX system) properly before turning off the power. Failure to do so can result in serious damage to the filesystem. Disks in UNIX are treated as though they contain filesystems that are maintained in a very orderly fashion; if you shut down Windows abruptly by pulling the power cord, the disks will have some fragmented files lying around after it reboots, but the system can cope with them. However, FreeBSD—like most UNIX systems—writes data to the disk in such a way that fragmentation is kept to an almost insignificant level, but an abrupt loss of power can cause the system to actually ...

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