halt / poweroff: symbolic links to reboot?

Hi, I'm learning about the halt and poweroff commands. What I found out just puzzles me. Here:

Code:

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$ which halt
/sbin/halt
$ file /sbin/halt
/sbin/halt: symbolic link to `reboot'
$ which poweroff
/sbin/poweroff
$ file /sbin/poweroff
/sbin/poweroff: symbolic link to `reboot'

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Could anyone explain?
Thanks,

What is it exactly that is puzzling you? Is it that those commands are coming up as being symbolic links? If so, I think your answer is that they are all the the same program. Looks like it to me, anyway.

Do you know about man pages? The manual pages you get with the command

Code:

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man <command name>

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I just looked, and saw that

Code:

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man halt

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Code:

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man poweroff

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Code:

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man reboot

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all pull up the same man page. Have a look at it yourself.

Basically running halt, poweroff, reboot just calls shutdown with certain flags set.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CharlesA

Basically running halt, poweroff, reboot just calls shutdown with certain flags set.

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Ah, I had wondered why there was more than just "shutdown". It does seem to do everything a person could need... ;)

I, when I need to turn the computer off from the terminal, use

Code:

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shutdown -r now

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to reboot,
and

Code:

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shutdown -P now

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to turn off completely.

Thanks, that really cleared it up for me.