On Wed, Apr 26, 2000 at 09:33:13AM +1000, Simon Burge wrote:
> Just to come back to this after a reminder on current-users:
> 
> A proposed change is to use "shutdown" as the argument when the system
> is coming down.  In most cases, "shutdown" will be ignored since most
> things don't need to be killed of in a special way - what init does
> is good enough.  The patch provides a way for xdm to handle shutdown.
> I'm not really sure that it's necessary for xdm, but it was in the old
> /etc/rc.shutdown and provides an example of how to do things.

Yes, it is necessary.

On some older memory-starved machines having a slow disk (for example, my
bosses laptop), the X server would not have restored the console to text mode
when it was kill -9'd, resulting in a _hanging machine_ that would not come
down on the first text console output. 

This was the reason rc.shutdown was invented in the first place.

(The same restrictions apply to big databases, like news servers).

Regards,
	Ignatios