halt

Halt the system

$ halt

$ halt --poweroff

$ halt --reboot

$ halt --force

$ halt --wtmp-only

poweroff [OPTIONS...]

reboot [OPTIONS...]

halt [OPTIONS...]

poweroff, reboot, and halt may be used to power off, reboot, or halt 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, when either halt or poweroff is invoked. This option is ignored when reboot is invoked.

--reboot

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

-f, --force

Force immediate power-off, halt, or reboot. If specified, the command does not contact the init system. In most cases, filesystems are not properly unmounted before shutdown. For example, the command reboot -f is mostly equivalent to systemctl reboot -ff, instead of systemctl reboot -f.

-w, --wtmp-only

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

-d, --no-wtmp

Do not write wtmp shutdown entry.

-n, --no-sync

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

--no-wall

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

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 poweroff, reboot, halt 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)