Manpages - halt.8

halt, poweroff, reboot - Halt, power-off or reboot the machine

halt [OPTIONS…]

poweroff [OPTIONS…]

reboot [OPTIONS…]

halt, poweroff, reboot may be used to halt, power-off, or reboot the machine. All three commands take the same options.

The following options are understood:

–help

Print a short help text and exit.

–halt

Halt the machine, regardless of which one of the three commands is invoked.

-p, –poweroff

Power-off the machine, regardless of which one of the three commands is invoked.

–reboot

Reboot the machine, regardless of which one of the three commands is invoked.

-f, –force

Force immediate halt, power-off, or reboot. When specified once, this results in an immediate but clean shutdown by the system manager. When specified twice, this results in an immediate shutdown without contacting the system manager. See the description of –force in *systemctl*(1) for more details.

-w, –wtmp-only

Only write wtmp shutdown entry, do not actually halt, power-off, reboot.

-d, –no-wtmp

Do not write wtmp shutdown entry.

-n, –no-sync

Dont sync hard disks/storage media before halt, power-off, reboot.

–no-wall

Do not send wall message before halt, power-off, reboot.

On success, 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise.

These commands are implemented in a way that preserves basic compatibility with the original SysV commands. systemctl*(1) verbs *halt, poweroff, reboot provide the same functionality with some additional features.

Note that on many SysV systems halt used to be synonymous to poweroff, i.e. both commands would equally result in powering the machine off. systemd is more accurate here, and halt results in halting the machine only (leaving power on), and poweroff is required to actually power it off.

*systemd*(1), *systemctl*(1), *shutdown*(8), *wall*(1)