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