shutdown brings the system down in a secure way. All logged-in users are notified that the system is going down, and login(1) is blocked. It is possible to shut the system down immediately or after a specified delay. All processes are first notified that the system is going down by the signal SIGTERM.

What is graceful shutdown?

A graceful shutdown is when a computer is turned off by software function and the operating system (OS) is allowed to perform its tasks of safely shutting down processes and closing connections. A hard shutdown is when the computer is forcibly shut down by interruption of power.

How do you shutdown a Linux server gracefully?

“reboot” command

The “p” options stands for poweroff. To reboot linux just call the reboot command directly without any options. This will perform a graceful shutdown and restart of the machine. This is what happens when you click restart from your menu.