fp on feebsd

[Bill Vermillion]

As Jerry Sloan was scratching "For a good prime call 
391581 * 2^216193 -1" on the wall, he suddenly said:

> Walter Vaughan wrote:

> >Enrique Arredondo wrote:

> >>How do you normally shutdown FREEBSD ? I tried "shutdown -g0 -y" but 
> >>didn't like it. So I pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL and it did the forced 
> >>shutdown automatically.

> >Yeah the 5.X and newer (I built FreeBSD-6 last night, so I understand 
> >your quest for the unknown side of things) really tries to be more 
> >mainstream in operation. The boot loader has an option that's very 
> >MS-Windows like with "Safe Mode" and intercepting the three finger 
> >salute.

> >Get the 4.10 minimal ISO and burn a copy of that. It'll install in 
> >about 10 minutes. That version feels very much like the SCO you're 
> >used to.

> >I've only really used "reboot"

> >%man reboot

> >REBOOT(8)               FreeBSD System Manager's Manual

> >NAME
> >     reboot, halt, fastboot, fasthalt -- stopping and restarting the 
> >system

> >SYNOPSIS
> >     halt [-lnqp] [-k kernel]
> >     reboot [-dlnqp] [-k kernel]
> >     fasthalt [-lnqp] [-k kernel]
> >     fastboot [-dlnqp] [-k kernel]

> >DESCRIPTION
> >The halt and reboot utilities flush the file system cache to disk, 
> >send all running processes a SIGTERM (and subsequently a SIGKILL) and, 
> >respec
> >tively, halt or restart the system.  The action is logged, including
> >entering a shutdown record into the wtmp(5) file.
> >[...]

> The command to reboot FreeBSD is this shutdown -r now to reboot, and 
> shutdown -h to halt and shutdown

And reboot works well too.

I'll suck to this message the output of  ls -lai `whence halt`
and follow that with reboot, fasthalt and fastboot.


1900 -r-xr-xr-x  4 root  wheel  229352 Jun 10 22:28 /sbin/halt
1900 -r-xr-xr-x  4 root  wheel  229352 Jun 10 22:28 /sbin/reboot
1900 -r-xr-xr-x  4 root  wheel  229352 Jun 10 22:28 /sbin/fasthalt
1900 -r-xr-xr-x  4 root  wheel  229352 Jun 10 22:28 /sbin/fastboot

As you can see all four are hardlinks to the same inode - number
1900.

And an excerpt from the shutdown man page:
========================================
SYNOPSIS
     shutdown [-] [-h | -p | -r | -k] [-o [-n]] time [warning-message ...]
... [deletia]


     -o      If one of the -h, -p or -r is specified, shutdown will execute
	     halt(8) or reboot(8) instead of sending signal to init(8).

     -n      If the -o is specified, prevent the file system cache from being
	     flushed by passing -n option to halt(8) or reboot(8).  This
	     option should probably not be used.
========================================

So when you run shutdown -r you call reboot, and shutdown -h calls
halt.  Shutdown can almost be thought of a wrapper for the above
command as it will delay them to the time specified if specified
in hh:mm format or in x minutes when given as +x

If you run 'strings' on /sbin/shutdown you will find /sbin/halt
and /sbin/reboot in the program.

So either method is fine if you just want a simple shutdown or
reboot.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com