When you shut down the system or reboot, a controlled process occurs so that the system is left in a good state. This process is:
All running startup items are called with the stop parameter, giving them a chance to shut down gracefully.
All running processes are stopped.
The system syncs the filesystems with their in-memory caches.
The system hands off control back to Open Firmware.
Open Firmware either shuts down the system or reboots, depending on the instructions that the system handed to it as it shut down.
Normally, you’ll shut down the system by selecting
→ Shut Down. You can also shut down from the command line using either the reboot
or the shutdown
command. To reboot the system, simply enter the following:
$ sudo reboot
To shut down the system:
$ sudo shutdown -h now