After upgrading from 6.2 to 7, running "shutdown -h now" no longer shuts down the machine and powers down the machine. It just shuts down and I have to manually power down. I checked /etc/rc.d/init.d/halt and found that at the end of the file halt is only given the -p option (necessary to powerdown the machine) if the following is true: [ -f /poweroff -o ! -f /halt ] I added an "ls /" command before that line to see what files were in my root directory at the time of shutdown and I found that /powerdown didn't exist but /halt did exist. I assume "/halt" was created temporarily by shutdown? Is this a change in behavior? Do I have to create /powerdown if I want shutdown to also powerdown the machine? In any case, commenting out the final conditional, so that -p was always added as an option, solved my problem.
I believe running 'poweroff' will do what you want.
Thanks. So I guess: "shutdown -h now" ==> "/sbin/powerdown" "shutdown -r now" ==> "/sbin/reboot" halt but no powerdown ==> "/sbin/halt" Does this change have to be documented anywhere?