From: Andrew Stevens (as@prg.ox.ac.uk)
Date: 07/29/92 

From: as@prg.ox.ac.uk (Andrew Stevens)
Subject: shutdown not doing so (solved)
Date: 29 Jul 1992 07:25:13 GMT

If, like me, you've been irritated by shutdown occasionally hanging
you may be interested to know the cause. Basically, when shutdown
runs it uses /etc/utmp to figure out which tty's to send shutdown
messages to. If /etc/utmp is messed up containing entries for
pty's with nothing attached (i.e. messily killed of xterm's and the
like) shutdown tries to write to these and hangs. Various
work-around's are (1) always kill things off by hand before exiting X-windows,
(2) hack shutdown to ignore pty's (3) Zap the /etc/utmp file by hand
if shutdown hangs.

I haven't (quite) got the energy to figure out the ioctl's needed to
properly cure this problem.

Andrew
        Andrew Stevens
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