shutdown using keyboard

Question

After I installed Ubuntu 13.10, for some reason my video card does not have output, I just wonder if this is the case, are there any way to shut down Ubuntu using keyboard safely without harm the system?

Your information and help is great appreciated.

Assuming you have sshd installed, you can ssh to the system from another on the network. If you don't have sshd installed, your in for an adventure! It's probably quasi-safe to power off because I assume you aren't logged in, and nothing is really running. — Elliott Frisch, Apr 20 '14 at 03:51
@ElliottFrisch The default ext4 filesystem has journals; so only the recent data would be lost and no filesystem corruption should occur. — Ramchandra Apte, Apr 20 '14 at 09:43

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 20 '14 at 04:04

5

If you can access a terminal use sudo poweroff. You can access a TTY by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1; TTY is just a terminal. You can return to the graphical desktop by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7.

Otherwise you can use kernel interupts to safely shutdown the computer:

Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen+R,E,I,S,U,B (Hold down Ctrl, Alt, and Prnt Scrn then press REISUB in that order with about a second pause between each letter)

The keyboard has to be plugged into the computer you want to shut down. The command above will restart the computer. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to just power-off this way. Hit the power button after the computer restarts to keep it from rebooting all the way.

answered Apr 20 '14 at 04:04

Paul Tanzini

3,927

To shut down, you can use REISUO instead of REISUB. – evilsoup Apr 20 '14 at 11:16
1

Unfortunately the O sys req command doesn't actually shut down the computer. I've had this discussion before on Askubuntu here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/389793/least-bad-way-to-shutdown-quickly/389800#389800 – Paul Tanzini Apr 20 '14 at 18:48

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 20 '14 at 08:37

Alternative terminal command which will shutdown computer

sudo shutdown -p now

now can be replaced with +m, where m is the number of minutes to wait until shutting down and hh:mm which specifies the time on the 24hr clock when your computer will shutdown.

Replace -p with -r to reboot instead of shutting your computer down.

Ctrl+Alt+t might open you an terminal if you are unable to access one.

shutdown using keyboard

2 Answers2