1.5. Shutting Down

To shut down Red Hat Linux, the root user may issue the /sbin/shutdown command. The shutdown man page has a complete list of options, but the two most common uses are:

/sbin/shutdown -h now
/sbin/shutdown -r now

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 shut down the system while in runlevels 1 through 5. However, not all Linux operating systems support this feature.

If the computer does not power itself down, be careful not turn off the computer until a message appears indicating that the system is halted.

Failure to wait for this message can mean that not all the hard drive partitions are unmounted, and can lead to file system corruption.