On January 24, 2015, Karen Lewellen wrote: > what is the keystroke for leaving Linux basically to shut down the > computer? > Unlike DOS, i understand you cannot just turn off the machine. Depending on how new the computer is, you can usually just hit the power button to initiate a shutdown (as opposed to holding it in for 3-5 seconds which does a hard power-off). The press (rather than press-and-hold) sends a shutdown signal to the operating system. If you want to initiate it from the command-line or over SSH, you can usually use one of "halt", "reboot", or "shutdown". You might have to prefix it with "sudo" because on a multi-user system, it would be rude to allow any old user to reboot it out from under other users. I usually use "halt" to power down the machine, and "reboot" to, well, reboot (that's rare). The "shutdown" command allows for additional options like sending messages to users that are logged in, deferring the shutdown for a period of time, etc. So those are the graceful ways to shut down. That said, if you're running a modern vintage of Linux, it should be fairly robust to handling abrupt power-offs. Mostly it boils down to things that your software thinks has been written to the drive but hasn't actually made it to the drive. If you use a journaling file-system (unless you're running a REALLY old version of Linux or you intentionally chose EXT2 or a FAT partition type on installation, you've likely have a journaling file-system since it's been the default for years). Also, if you have external drives like a USB drive, you'd want to make sure that either it's set to write synchronously or that you properly unmount it since it's usually a FAT file-system which can lose data. And if you're booting off a live CD, doing all your work on the internet, and not actually saving anything locally? Feel free to unceremoniously rip the cord from the wall since there's nothing that won't be restored on a fresh boot. Though I still usually just do a regular shutdown out of habit. (grins) -tim _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list