how to properly (or alternatively?) shutdown linux from terminal?

Question

I wrote sudo shutdown now on my ubuntu VM terminal and the results were not what i expected. I expected results similar to shutting down through the desktop GUI but instead it shut down rather quickly and brought me to a recovery prompt (i think it was apache's, maybe not) and started up again.

How do i shutdown the way i am expecting through the terminal?

Answer 1

halt will do what you're looking to do.

sudo halt

Otherwise I believe you wanted to do

sudo shutdown -h now

Source

Answer 2

Try

sudo shutdown -h now