How do I shut down Raspbian with the keyboard but no monitor?

From the terminal mode: press Ctrl-Alt-Del on the keyboard.

This is configured in /etc/inittab:

# What to do when CTRL-ALT-DEL is pressed. ca:12345:ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t1 -a -r now

From the desktop: it depends on what desktop software.

Sorry, I don't understand the instructions. What does the first bit mean for example? ca:12345? ca? Do you mean type a colon or is that just your indication of a separator? What does that do with no app running?

The ctrl-alt-del brings up the task manager and I can see that the text gets typed in at the bottom right, but disappears after a second or so. I can't type that stuff in _with_ a monitor.

Never mind. Got it. I got confused first trying your instructions at the terminal, then when that didn't work at the desktop. I must've mistyped the first time round. Thanks.

You do not need to do anything with those lines except verify that indeed they are there in /etc/inittab.

When you hit ctrl-alt-del the system will run /sbin/shutdown -t1 -a -r now

When you want to know how that works and what else you can do, type: man inittab

I'll add for the benefit of anybody as confused as I was:

edit /etc/innitab and find this line:

ca:12345:ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t1 -a -r now

then change the -r to -h

then just do ctrl-alt-del in terminal mode (the change isn't effective until it's rebooted once). It now shuts down instead of rebooting.

I'm not sure what -a or -t1 does since that's not in man shutdown or shutdown --help.

-a means it will consult /etc/shutdown.allow if present, to see who is allowed to shutdown.

-t1 is related to timing during the shutdown.

You are right, when you want it to remain off after Ctrl-Alt-Del you can use -h instead of -r, else it will reboot. (normally I just pull the power when it wants to reboot, at least then you have done a clean shutdown)

Changes to /etc/inittab become effective immediately if you type init q (as root or using sudo)

Yes, I can just recycle the power for reboot, but it would be nice to have hotkeys for shutdown _and_ reboot. Google only seems to turn up people asking the same question but no solution:

one quick option would be to change the program run to a simple script that waits for another key-press & then calls the correct variant. I may experiment with this later if i get the time.

another option is the SysRq key which has various options if enabled correctly (google linux SysRq)

Sounds good. Grabbing the keyboard is the hard bit I guess.

Op Sun, 19 Oct 2014 09:22:56 +0000 (UTC) schreef Ed Davies:

info shutdown describes what -a and -t1 do.

to be honest i think the SYSRq key is what you want

it enables you to flush buffers, shut down or kill all processes, halt or reboot the system & it is built in at the kernel level.

Another option is to have something that runs halt or shutdown when it sees one of the GPIO pins change state. I have an app which runs on the Pi and it using the GPIO pins anyway, without any keyboard or display. So I have the app monitor a spare i/o port* which has a 'HALT' button connected to it, and it fires off a configurable command, such as "(sync; sync; sync; poweroff)&" Of course, this only works if the app itself is working at the time.

If you have spare GPIO pins, you can wire buttons to it to do that and use a simple shell script to monitor/control. Shorting one of the I2C lines to 0v will reboot a halted Pi too.

Gordon