Chapter 3. Boot Process, Init, and Shutdown

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3.8. Shutting Down

To shut down Red Hat Linux, issue the

shutdown

command. You can read the

shutdown

man page

for complete details, but the two most common uses are:

/sbin/shutdown  h now

/sbin/shutdown  r now

You must run

shutdown

as root. After shutting everything down, the

 h

option will halt the machine,

and the

 r

option will reboot.

Non root users can use the

reboot

and

halt

commands to shutdown the system while in runlevels 1

through 5. However, not all Linux operating systems support this feature.

If your computer does not power itself down, be careful not turn off the computer until you see a

message indicating that the system is halted.

Failure to wait for this message means you may be turning off the machine before the hard drive

partitions are unmounted, which can cause file system corruption