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From: dillon@flea.best.net (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Powering Down
Date: 13 Jul 1997 01:51:44 -0700
Organization: Best Internet Communications, Inc. - 415 964 BEST
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Message-ID: <5qa4v0$e5h$1@flea.best.net>
References: <33c49208.1255785@news.dixonssurgical.co.uk> <5q8h0b$kce$1@news1.sympatico.ca> <5q9ooi$3hk@baygull.rtd.com>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:44341
A few people have asked me why I do a shutdown -r rather then a halt.
I didn't explain the reason. The reason is simply that when you
are in an X session, 'halt' will sometimes kill the system quickly enough
to prevent the X session from switching back to the character mode
screen... so you never see the 'you may now turn off the computer'
message, the screen just freezes up and you have to guess. By doing
a 'shutdown -r ...' or 'reboot' command, you can tell when it's safe
to kill the power because the screen flips back to character mode
when the box reboots into the BIOS. That's all.
For good measure, I do a couple of 'sync' commands before reboot, kinda
like a mantra: sync, sync, reboot. (p.s. this is actually three sync's
because reboot also does a sync)... mainly because I have never in my
life trusted the kernel (any kernel) to wait for the disks to completely
finish the flush before the system hard-resets the box.
-Matt