What is the difference between halt and shutdown

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Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 8 months ago. Active 2 years, 5 months ago. Viewed k times. What is the difference between the halt and shutdown commands? Improve this question.

Stephane Rolland 3, 5 5 gold badges 33 33 silver badges 47 47 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer.

PleaseStand PleaseStand 6 6 silver badges 3 3 bronze badges. Good explanation! On systemd Linux operating systems, these commands exist in the words of the systemd doco "for compatibility only". There are not separate halt , reboot , and shutdown programs that invoke one another. There's one single program, with a lot of command-line parsers that funnel into one code path internally. Nor are there run levels. Nor does shutdown go into a single user mode.

Indeed, single user mode itself has been renamed. For details, see unix. I've tested it on debian but it will halt. The past In the s, the BSDs had halt , reboot , and shutdown. Further reading halt. SCO OpenServer manual. Prentice Hall. Today Nowadays, we have a range of possible system management toolsets. Further reading: shutdown. System Manager's Manual.

NetBSD Manual pages. OpenBSD Manual pages. FreeBSD Manual pages. The nosh toolset In the nosh system management toolset, halt , fasthalt , poweroff , fastpoweroff , reboot , and fastboot are all one program.

Further reading: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard Jonathan de Boyne Pollard The upstart toolset Like with nosh, in the upstart system management toolset the opposite of received BSD wisdom applies.

Further reading: Scott James Remnant. It may be used to halt, power-off or reboot the machine. Additionally, you may set a wall message to be sent to all logged-in users before the system goes down. You can use it to get the system to a state where you can perform low level maintenance.

Note that in some cases it completely shuts down the system. Below are examples of halt commands:. As mentioned earlier on, understanding these commands will enable to effectively and reliably manage Linux server in a multi-user environment. Do you have any additional ideas? Share them with us via the comments section below. TecMint is the fastest growing and most trusted community site for any kind of Linux Articles, Guides and Books on the web.

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For instance, the shutdown command will also write a shutdown script. Perhaps, you just want to do low-level maintenance, halt will be a suitable command to use as it will stop all running process and stop the CPU as well.

You will probably remember halt quicker than Shutdown -H and as for reboot , self explanatory. To get the system to a state where you can perform low-level maintenance, you can use this command.

Please Note : You would face some cases that it completely shuts down the system. Good job! You finished this tutorial and from now, by understanding these commands will enable to effectively and reliably manage Linux server in a multi-user environment. To read more, read Linux tricks articles. Dear user, we wish this tutorial would be helpful for you, to ask any question or review the conversation of our users about this article, please visit Ask page.

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