Shutting down applications and systems
Killing Fields
Linux offers a variety of tools for shutting down systems and processes. We describe some important commands.
Compared with Windows, Linux offers a stable operating system. Every now and again, however, you will need to intervene to stop an application that has frozen or misbehaved. You might also want to shut down the entire system because you want to reboot with a new kernel or edit partitions – or simply because you prefer not to leave your machine running because of the risk of thunderstorms. In any of these situations, you can often use desktop tools, but, as usual, working from the command line gives you more options.
Besides, if your system is experiencing problems, a desktop tool is probably more likely to misbehave than a command-line tool. There's simply more that can go wrong.
For these circumstances, Linux offers a variety of tools. To control applications, the shell offers the bluntly named kill and killall commands, as well as the deadliest of them all, killall5. For turning off your system, you can choose between the classic command shutdown or the similarly organized halt, poweroff, and reboot. More recently, these commands have been joined by scripts to hibernate or suspend.
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