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Should I be using one or the other for different things?

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  • man halt covers the differences Jan 23, 2011 at 22:58
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    have read it, just wanted clairification Jan 26, 2011 at 3:42

1 Answer 1

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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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    Whenever I use the halt command on Mac OS X and Linux, it completely shuts my system down.
    – Wuffers
    Jan 24, 2011 at 0:15
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    This is slightly incorrect. shutdown can bring the system to any of these states, including single user mode (the default). Also, there is the poweroff command, turning power off (if possible).
    – maxelost
    Jan 24, 2011 at 16:45
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    yeah 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
  • @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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    @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

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