On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 07:02:18PM +0100, Matthew Theobalds wrote:
> I had always thought that "reboot" and "poweroff" are the correct ones 
> for BSD whilst "shutdown" had been put in to maintain sideways 
> compatibility with those coming from a GNU background.

Actually, shutdown first showed up (according to *our* man pages, of
course) in 4.0BSD. halt and reboot (hadn't ever heard of poweroff;
it seems to have been added in NetBSD 1.5... makes me wonder what
was wrong with shutdown -hp, but whatever) stem from System 6 UNIX.

The important distinction is that shutdown notifies users of their
impending doom and does the appropriate rc.shutdown stuff. halt,
reboot, whatever just sends SIGTERM to everything, waits to see if
anything lives through it, sends that SIGKILL, then kicks the
machine's power.

I find this comment, from shutdown(8), the best explanation of why
both methods still exist today:

     shutdown provides an automated shutdown procedure for super-users to
     nicely notify users when the system is shutting down, saving them from
     system administrators, hackers, and gurus, who would otherwise not bother
     with such niceties.

I'm assuming "them" references users there, though I guess it's a
bit unclear. ;^>

None of this changes the fact that these should never, ever cause
any kind of panic.

> Certainly, no problem at all. It occurred to me that I perhaps ought to 
> do so, however I wasn't sure whether or not this counted as a bug, but 
> now I know.

Just the fact that you can't list the line of code at fault doesn't
preclude the filing of a bug-report.

It's actually plausible that this is a hardware problem, but it's
still the kind of thing that ought to be looked at.

Which brings me to my next point: any chance this is a hardware
problem? Does it happen when other OSes try to reboot the machine?

> before I went away. It has just occurred to me that it is likely that 
> the "/dev/MAKEDEV" script installs relative to one's path. I should have 
> cd-ed in first, evidently.
> 
> Panic's over, folks! My own stupidity.

Heh. I even considered suggesting that that's what had happened. :^>

-- 
       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net