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How do I programatically trigger a system shutdown or reboot in Linux? Preferably without requiring elevated privileges.
On older releases (e.g. Ubuntu 10.04) I could call HAL’s org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement.Shutdown or Reboot methods using D-Bus. See: http://people.freedesktop.org/~dkukawka/hal-spec-git/hal-spec.html#interface-device-systempower.
However HAL appears to be obsolete, and is not present in Ubuntu 12.10. What is the current best-practice for doing this?
You can use ConsoleKit. Send a
org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.StopDBus message toorg.freedesktop.ConsoleKit. From the command line, that would be something like:dbus-send \ --system \ --dest=org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit \ --type=method_call \ --print-reply \ --reply-timeout=2000 \ /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Manager \ org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.StopIf the current user is authorized to perform shutdown, then no root privileges are needed.
You can also take a look at the KShutdown utility. It contains source code for different shutdown methods, ranging from ConsoleKit to Gnome and KDE APIs.