I’m an idiot.

I probably shouldn’t be admitting to this, but today I found my new 12th-Gen Framework laptop had drained its battery whilst completely shutdown. This wasn’t the first time in hindsight.

So I started searching through the interwebs and found various discussions about battery issues with the 11th-Gen, and came across this thread.

This post in particular caught my attention:

$ sudo shutdown -H -P +0

-H = halt -P = power off +0 = now

The syntax of shutdown changed with systemd. Some things still us OLD methods $(shutdown -h now), which doesn’t always do the things on NEW hardware.

For some context, I’m experimenting with a Sway setup on my laptop. For years now I’ve been running Gnome so usually when I’m shutting down my desktop or laptop it’s with a click of a button in a UI.

Over the years whenever I’ve had to shutdown a server or a VM I’ve always used shutdown -H now. I don’t remember learning this, it’s just muscle memory by now.

So for the last couple weeks when I’ve been shutting down my laptop, I’ve been using shutdown -H now, as Sway doesn’t have a button for the likes of idiots like me.

Colour me surprised when I checked the man page (for the first time) of shutdown:

OPTIONS
       The following options are understood:

       --help
           Print a short help text and exit.

       -H, --halt
           Halt the machine.

       -P, --poweroff
           Power the machine off (the default).

       -r, --reboot
           Reboot the machine.

       -h
           The same as --poweroff, but does not override the action to take if it is "halt". E.g.  shutdown --reboot -h means "poweroff", but shutdown --halt -h means "halt".

Have you noticed it yet?

I’m guessing you already knew and are looking at the screen in disgust thinking I’m a fucking idiot and should be thoroughly ashamed of myself (I am 😢).

For those like me who didn’t know:

  • shutdown -H now halts the system without delay
  • shutdown -h now halts the system and POWERS IT OFF! without delay
  • shutdown now ALSO halts the system and powers it off without delay, since -P is the FUCKING DEFAULT!
Captain Picard with his head in his hand

All these years I could have been typing less characters and having the desired effect… 😅

This has been your monthly reminder that knowledge without understanding is about as useful as a concrete parachute.