“shutdown now” never shut it down (i.e. powered off)

[Member Bajingan]

shutdown now never really shut it down. Instead, it prompts to ask root password to do maintenance routine of something, or doing nothing with blinking cursor in Linux prompt.

If I press Ctrl+D, it would start the OS up.

[Moderator christophe]

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I don’t see a question here — but I think you are looking for the command to shut down?

sudo poweroff

shuts you down from command line without asking for password.

EDIT:

or using the shutdown command, as you did:

sudo shutdown -h now

does shut down & halt the computer, after entering password.

Let us know if I missed what you were asking. 😉

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by christophe. Reason: added shutdown command part

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I usually say either

Sudo halt

Or

sudo power off

If I type something; otherwise I use the window manager or desktop environment to halt the system.

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Brian Masinick

[Member Bajingan]

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But, what I don’t understand is why shutdown now behaves like that?

After stopping the services, then ask a root password or press Ctrl+D to continue.

[Member seaken64]

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the shutdown command has a lot of switches/arguments. Did you read the man page for shutdown for clues as to what the different switches do?

Seaken64

[Member seaken64]

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My guess is that this is the behavior if you are not root or do not proceed the command with sudo.

Seaken64

[Member blur13]

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You need to use the -h option to get the shutdown behavior you’d expect coming from windows. Took some time to figure that out for me as well.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I still recommend simply typing in the command you want, for instance, sudo reboot, sudo halt, or sudo poweroff.

However, if you INSIST to do it another way (and it was recommended that you read the shutdown man page; well, here it is:

man shutdown:

SHUTDOWN(8)                        shutdown                        SHUTDOWN(8)

NAME
       shutdown - Halt, power-off or reboot the machine

SYNOPSIS
       shutdown [OPTIONS...] [TIME] [WALL...]

DESCRIPTION
       shutdown may be used to halt, power-off or reboot the machine.

       The first argument may be a time string (which is usually "now").
       Optionally, this may be followed by a wall message to be sent to all
       logged-in users before going down.

       The time string may either be in the format "hh:mm" for hour/minutes
       specifying the time to execute the shutdown at, specified in 24h clock
       format. Alternatively it may be in the syntax "+m" referring to the
       specified number of minutes m from now.  "now" is an alias for "+0",
       i.e. for triggering an immediate shutdown. If no time argument is
       specified, "+1" is implied.

       Note that to specify a wall message you must specify a time argument,    
       too.
                                                                                
       If the time argument is used, 5 minutes before the system goes down the
       /run/nologin file is created to ensure that further logins shall not be
       allowed.
                                                                                
OPTIONS
       The following options are understood:
                                                                                
       --help
           Print a short help text and exit.                                    
                                                                                
       -H, --halt                                                               
           Halt the machine.
                                                                                
       -P, --poweroff                                                           
           Power-off the machine (the default).                                 
                                                                                
       -r, --reboot

       -h
           Equivalent to --poweroff, unless --halt is specified.

       -k
           Do not halt, power-off, reboot, just write wall message.

       --no-wall
           Do not send wall message before halt, power-off, reboot.

       -c
           Cancel a pending shutdown. This may be used to cancel the effect of
 EXIT STATUS
       On success, 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise.

SEE ALSO
       systemd(1), systemctl(1), halt(8), wall(1)

systemd 247                                                        SHUTDOWN(8)
          an invocation of shutdown with a time argument that is not "+0" or
           "now".

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I got that from a different system; we don’t DO systemd here; that one came from the siduction 2021 C-Blues man page, sorry!

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Brian Masinick

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