Practical UNIX

Shutting Down the System

It is vital that UNIX be shut down properly before the power is turned off to prevent file corruption or loss. Use the UNIX shutdown command to do this. There are alternative commands to shut down the system, such as powerdown, reboot, haltsys, or init 0. Beware of such commands. The man pages will tell you that all users must already be logged out, filesystems must be unmounted, and networking must be closed before it is safe to run some of those commands. In general, you should use the shutdown command, which is designed to bring the system down safely.

Warning for DOS/Windows Users Many users of DOS and old Windows systems have learned that they can usually power off the system without a proper shutdown as long as ...