[plug] How to force a shutdown with reboot??

[Nick Bannon]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 01:03:03PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 12:55:30PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:
> | BTW I am under the impression that this would just invoke `shutdown`,
> | because traditionally you would want `shutdown` to do nice things and
> | poke `init` prior to `reboot` on a multi-user system.
> 
> No, it's actually equivalent to 'init 6' (or 'init 0' in the case of
> halt/poweroff).  reboot -f forces a reboot Right Now.  man reboot :-)

"shutdown" is the right way to invoke it, it lets you log a reason for
the shutdown, warn other users, and use a timer. It will do all that,
then call init, then shutdown the machine.

"init 6" (or "init 0") is what does most of the work.

Unless the system is actually sitting at the correct runlevel waiting
to be kicked, halt/reboot/poweroff call shutdown, unless forced.

If the shutdown gets stuck halfway through, you can see where it's up
to with "pstree -p". Perhaps a process needs to be more forcibly
killed, or a NFS mount is hanging.

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal