Should I be using one or the other for different things?
1 Answer
halt
brings the system down to its lowest state, but leaves it powered on.
shutdown
brings the system down to its lowest state, and will turn off power (soft power switch) if it can. Most computers now can do so.
reboot
restarts the system. It brings the system down to its lowest state, then starts it up again.
Which to do depends on what you want to do. halt
is usually to get to a state where you can perform low level maintenance. shutdown
is to power the system off, and reboot is to reboot it.
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2Whenever I use the
halt
command on Mac OS X and Linux, it completely shuts my system down.– WuffersJan 24, 2011 at 0:15 -
9This is slightly incorrect.
shutdown
can bring the system to any of these states, including single user mode (the default). Also, there is thepoweroff
command, turning power off (if possible).– maxelostJan 24, 2011 at 16:45 -
2yeah halt also completely turns my computer off ( Ubuntu server 9.04) but I normally just type halt to poweroff and reboot to restart because its shorter than the shutdown command. Any harm in that? Jan 26, 2011 at 3:40
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@loosecanon - ask your question in a separate question. :-) There is actually an issue with what you suggest, and could cause data loss. Jul 27, 2015 at 14:57
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1@ManuelJordan it’s not really used anymore, it was used back in the days of big honkin’ Solaris boxes. It was used to get the machine where the OS wasn’t running, whether that meant power off or drop to the equivalent of bios or whatever. Apr 23, 2022 at 17:51