Will the Shutdown command break anything?

[atlantic]

Sorry, total noob question but is a cron job with 'Shutdown -p now' the right way to schedule shutting down the server every night? Will it cause damage to any of the datasets if they are being written to at the time?

 

[Kris Moore]

That should be safe to use, our software uses a variation of that already.

 

[atlantic]

Thanks Kris. Could you tell me if it waits for a process to finish or kills it asap? I'm assuming the latter, and if so is there an alternative command that waits for all write processes (ie backups, replications) to stop and then shutdown?

 

[Kris Moore]

Both. It attempts a graceful shutdown of every process, however if something hangs too long it may force-kill it to complete the shutdown. This is fine in normal operations.

 

[atlantic]

Nice. This was my only lead on diagnosing a corrupt time machine backup, so I need to do more digging. Thanks for the explanation.