On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 03:41:56PM -0500, Joachim Thiemann wrote:
> For my own part, I am the sole user of a laptop, so no point in having 
> shutdown use wall to tell me that the machine is going down...

That's not the only difference. If you don't use shutdown, any /etc/rc.d
scripts are not run. This means your datase servers are not gracefully shut
down or whatever your local machine configuration would require at 
shutdown time.

In general, it's only safe to use "halt -p" or "reboot" in a controlled 
environment, like from single user mode - or if you realy now your machine
does not need any /etc/rc.d shutdown scripts.

The safe default is to use "shutdown".

Martin