On Wed, 17 Jul 1996, World Scientific Publishing US Office wrote:

>         Does "halt" do the same as "shutdown -h now"?

It does not.  The shutdown(8) command stops the system as gracefully as it
can, and as its final step effectively does a halt(8).  It's not unfair to
characterize them like this:

shutdown:	"Please stop.  I'll give you about a minute, and then the
		system is going down.  Thanks."

halt:		"We will have order!  System is going down NOW! <click>"

--scott