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.

Although the reboot and halt commands are now able to invoke shutdown if run while the system is in runlevels 1-5, it is a bad habit to get into, as not all Linux-like operating systems have this feature.

Warning

If your computer does not power itself down, you should not turn off the computer until you see a message indicating that the system is halted or finished shutting down. Failure to wait for this message will mean that you may be turning off the machine before your hard drive partitions are unmounted. This can cause filesystem corruption, even to the point where your system may not boot the next time it attempts to start up. Be patient when halting your system.