SUMMARY: init vs shutdown

Thanks for the quick answers.  It never dawned on me that shutdown was a
script (I'm primarily an HPUX admin - shutdown is binary there).

In short, the shutdown command does several things before it calls init.

- warns users
- does a sync 

After talking with the vendor, he wanted to use init only because during his
tests, init actually performed a power off, while shutdown didn't (it just
shutdown the OS according to him).

I realize we could do a sync then init, but since that's two commands - it's
just another place to cause a problem if one is forgotten.  Shutdown does
the same thing without the risk of forgetting the sync.  Since the vendor
(this is an application vendor giving OS instructions) isn't going to
support the system if it doesn't come up, we're going to do it via the
shutdown.

---------------------------------------------------------
Gary Paveza, Jr.
Senior Systems Administrator -CSA
(302) 252-4831 - phone
(302) 588-6368 - cell


-----Original Message-----
From: Paveza, Gary [mailto:gary.paveza@aig.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 8:13 AM
To: 'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org'
Subject: init vs shutdown

Can someone explain the difference between doing an init 5 and a shutdown -i
5?   I'm fairly certain that the proper way to shutdown the system is using
the shutdown command, but we have an application vendor who insists that the
proper method is init 5.   Interestingly enough, this weekend, a box was
shutdown with init 5 and had filesystem corruption, but the system that was
done via shutdown didn't.

I've checked the man pages for both, and while it states that init 5 will
bring to a power down state, it isn't really clear which should be used.

---------------------------------------------------------
Gary Paveza, Jr.
Senior Systems Administrator -CSA
(302) 252-4831 - phone
(302) 588-6368 - cell
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