The appearance of the new VMware Workstation 8.04 "feature," the Recovery Menu, suggested for me an investigation into the differences between shutdown and halt. (M)an shutdown says shutdown arranges for the system to be brought down in a safe way. Users on the system are notified. (S)hutdown options include shutdown -P, which requests that the system be powered off after it has been brought down. (M)an halt says when halt is called without options, it simply invokes shutdown. Apparently some halt options cause the system to stop more abruptly than with shutdown. This is underscored by the following post on a Unix (Solaris) forum, found by googling "difference between shutdown and halt":
The shutdown command runs various shutdown scripts and then finally invokes the halt command. Not running those scripts could be a problem depending on what they do. As one example, if you are running an Oracle database, you could lose transactions or even mangle the database....
Wanting to more frequently use Vim, I downloaded a MS DOS version at http://www.vim.org/download.php. The download was a .zip file. I used a Windows utility to download and unzip the file. (I did not figure out how to download and unzip in DOS. Sorry, maybe next time.) File downloaded and unzipped, I went to the DOS command line and found it, in directory of downloaded files. I did not want the file in a download directory, but in the program files directory. So I tried to moved it to my program files directory with the DOS command
move c:\Downloads\vim71w32\*.* c:\Program_Files
But I got this message:
The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
0 file(s) moved.
What was the other process that would be using the Vim file, preventing me from moving it? I decided at that point to go the easy route and figure out the issue another day. I opened the download folder window, opened the c: window, and dragged and dropped the Vim folder icon from the former into the latter. The DOS version of Vim resembles that of Linux. The help feature does not work. Maybe I will fix it. Anyway, I now have a version of Vim in Windows, which I have the idea of using for typical word processing tasks, such as producing this blog. We'll see how it goes.
2 comments:
Interesting experiments. I wouldn't use halt without a really good reason. Shutdown does close running processes in an orderly manner. I'm not sure why the recovery menu option was added to 8.04. Perhaps it's because in the real world, Linux servers rarely need to be shut down and if you do, perhaps there's a problem.
For a command level unzip, you need a command level program, which windows doesn't provide, I don't think. If you google [command line zip windows], you'll see some options.
I've put a command-level unzip on my list of things to do. I think I'll do it when I look into Windows Power Shell.
Currently I spend time learning Ruby when not working with the IRLS 672 topics. I'm not sure I have a talent for programming; it's slow going. I'm sticking with it.
There's a lot to learn out there.
Post a Comment