The Shutdown Process

A system might have to be shut down for various reasons:

  • To prevent the system from an anticipated power failure

  • To perform maintenance tasks, such as backup and recovery

  • To perform a reconfiguration boot when new hardware devices are added or removed

  • To force a crash dump when the system hangs

  • To repair a damaged file system

  • To boot the system using the kernel debugger

  • To perform an installation

A system can be shut down with any one of the following commands: init, shutdown, reboot, poweroff, or halt. The administrator should choose the method of shutdown depending on the reason behind the shutdown. The rest of this section discusses which command is appropriate for each kind of shutdown. The shutdown and the init commands are ...

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