> I'm quite sure that in original Berkeley Unix, as on the VAX 11/780, halt > was an immediate halt of the CPU without any process cleanup or file system > umounting or anything. Early SunOS (pre-Solaris) was like this, too. > The SunOS 4.1.2 man page for halt says NAME halt - stop the processor SYNOPSIS /usr/etc/halt [ -oqy ] DESCRIPTION halt writes out any information pending to the disks and then stops the processor. halt normally logs the system shutdown to the system log daemon, syslogd(8), and places a shutdown record in the login accounting file Ivar/admlwtmp. These actions are inhibited if the -0 or -q options are present. The BSD 4.3 (that ran on VAXen) man pages say largely similar things: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=halt&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=4.3BSD+Reno&arch=default&format=html Everything is somewhere on the net :-) P.