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So i've been using poweroff command to shutdown my computer at a specific hour.

Is it okay for the hardware to do this (e.g hard drives)? Or should I use other system call?

Fisher
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    As I understand it, poweroff makes sure the drives are synced and so forth, so it should not cause hardware issues. However, it does not give software a chance to terminate cleanly - you should use `shutdown` for this. – user55325 Jun 24 '11 at 18:41
  • On most systems, **poweroff** and **shutdown -h** are _exactly_ the same. Debian/Ubuntu is one of these systems. You have to call **poweroff -f** to skip the shutdown phase, according to the man page. – Flimzy Jun 24 '11 at 19:34
  • What about unmounting drives? Should i worry about that? – Fisher Jun 24 '11 at 20:47
  • @Fisher the hardware itself doesn't care if the drives are mounted or not, so that's not an issue. Data on the drives may be corrupted, but the drive itself (hardware) will be fine. –  Nov 19 '14 at 09:24

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poweroff is the proper way to do this. shutdown -h is exactly equivalent in Debian/Ubuntu (and most other systems).

Flimzy
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