What's the correct way to shutdown system while apt-get is still running

Question

What's the correct way to shutdown system while apt-get is still running? apt-get complains about unclean shutdown when I just shutdown computer.

Answer 1

As an elaboration on Piskvor's advice ("don't"), you could issue this command at the shell prompt:

sleep 10m ; shutdown -h now

The above assumes you're running as superuser.

The idea is to let apt-get finish before shutting down without your having to sit there waiting for it to end. You could write a more elegant script that, e.g., uses ps and grep to detect whether apt-get has completed, but I don't have access to a Linux box here at work to test such a script on.

Answer 2

Close apt-get first? Perhaps using an interrupt signal (^C if in foreground, otherwise kill)

Update:

You can get a list of signals with kill -l

$ kill -l
 1) SIGHUP       2) SIGINT       3) SIGQUIT      4) SIGILL
 5) SIGTRAP      6) SIGABRT      7) SIGBUS       8) SIGFPE
 9) SIGKILL     10) SIGUSR1     11) SIGSEGV     12) SIGUSR2
13) SIGPIPE     14) SIGALRM     15) SIGTERM     17) SIGCHLD
18) SIGCONT     19) SIGSTOP     20) SIGTSTP     21) SIGTTIN
22) SIGTTOU     23) SIGURG      24) SIGXCPU     25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF     28) SIGWINCH    29) SIGIO
30) SIGPWR      31) SIGSYS      32) SIGRTMIN    33) SIGRTMIN+1
34) SIGRTMIN+2  35) SIGRTMIN+3  36) SIGRTMIN+4  37) SIGRTMIN+5
38) SIGRTMIN+6  39) SIGRTMIN+7  40) SIGRTMIN+8  41) SIGRTMIN+9
42) SIGRTMIN+10 43) SIGRTMIN+11 44) SIGRTMIN+12 45) SIGRTMIN+13
46) SIGRTMIN+14 47) SIGRTMIN+15 48) SIGRTMAX-15 49) SIGRTMAX-14
50) SIGRTMAX-13 51) SIGRTMAX-12 52) SIGRTMAX-11 53) SIGRTMAX-10
54) SIGRTMAX-9  55) SIGRTMAX-8  56) SIGRTMAX-7  57) SIGRTMAX-6
58) SIGRTMAX-5  59) SIGRTMAX-4  60) SIGRTMAX-3  61) SIGRTMAX-2
62) SIGRTMAX-1  63) SIGRTMAX

Before trying 9 (SIGKILL), the nuclear option, you can try gentler signals such as HUP, INT, QUIT, or maybe USR1, USR2 or ABRT. Really the program docs for apt-get ought to say if it handles any of these signals differently. As it doesn't I don't hold out a lot of hope. Some bug reports mentioned that INT should work.