poweroff - Man Page

• Power off the system: poweroff
• Halt the system (same as halt): poweroff --halt
• Reboot the system (same as reboot): poweroff --reboot
• Shut down immediately without contacting the system manager: poweroff --force
• Write the wtmp shutdown entry without shutting down the system: poweroff --wtmp-only

tldr.sh

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.

Added in version 253.

--halt

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

Added in version 253.

-p,  --poweroff

Power off the machine, when either halt or poweroff is invoked. This option is ignored when reboot is invoked.

Added in version 253.

--reboot

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

Added in version 253.

-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.

Added in version 253.

-w,  --wtmp-only

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

Added in version 253.

-d,  --no-wtmp

Do not write wtmp shutdown entry.

Added in version 253.

-n,  --no-sync

Don't sync hard disks/storage media before power-off, reboot, or halt.

Added in version 253.

--no-wall

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

Added in version 253.

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)

fsck.minix(8), mkfs.minix(8), reboot(2), shutdown(8), sudo(8), systemd.directives(7), systemd.index(7), virt-p2v(1).

The man pages halt(8) and reboot(8) are aliases of poweroff(8).