RE: System broken after full-upgrade: please help!

[Bonno Bloksma <b.bloksma@tio.nl>]

Hi,

> On Sat, 09 Aug 2014 10:46:51 +0000 Rodolfo Medina sent:
>
> <snip>
> 
>> I've always used `halt' to shutdown the machine.  Is `poweroff'
>> proper to do that?
>> 
>> Rodolfo
>
> poweroff doesn't work for me, but I tried it as root, next time I use it I will try it as user and see if it works then. shutdown now does work as root.


Rodolfo: Yes, poweroff is now the "proper way" to shutdown a machine.

Wanderer: While using Wheezy starting to use poweroff is the proper way to migrate from halt. But I do agree, it might have been a good idea to communicate this in a better way. 

Charlie: According to the man pages all 3, halt, poweroff and reboot, use the shutdown command to perform the necessary steps when not starting in runlevel 0 or 6, which is pretty much always. So it is really weird that in your case poweroff does not work but shutdown does. 

----<quote>-----
If  halt  or  reboot is called when the system is not in runlevel 0 or 6, in other words when it's running normally, shutdown will be invoked instead (with the -h or -r flag). For more info see the shutdown(8) manpage.
[...]
Under older sysvinit releases , reboot and halt should never be called directly. From release 2.74 on halt and reboot invoke shutdown(8) if the system is not in runlevel 0 or 6. This means that if halt or reboot cannot find out the current runlevel (for example, when /var/run/utmp hasn't been initialized correctly) shutdown will be called, which might not be what you want.  Use the -f flag if you want to do a hard halt or reboot.
----<quote>-----

Bonno Bloksma