CentOS, Fedora and RedHat are Linux distributions of the same family. These distributions provides different ways and command in order to restart. In this tutorial we will look different ways to restart CentOS, Fedora and RedHat and their affect to the system.
Restart with Shutdown Command
shutdown
command is the most common way to stop or restart the system. Without providing an option shutdown will shutdown the system but will not restart. We will provide -r
option in order to restart the system like below.
$ shutdown -r
Restart with Shutdown Command At Specified Time
By default shutdown operation starts immediately. But we have the option to reboot at specified time in the future. We generally use minutes after to reboot. In this example we will restart the system after 5
minutes by providing +5
option.
$ shutdown -r +5

Restart with Reboot Command
Reboot is actually not a command. reboot
is a script which is alias for shutdown -r
. So their affect will be the same. We can use reboot
command like below. reboot
also does some hard disk maintenance like sync etc.
$ reboot
Restart with Halt Command
We can use halt
command with --reboot
option. halt
command provides some log to the utmp
. Most init scripts call halt
for logging options. We can restart system like below with halt
command.
$ halt --reboot
Restart with Init Level
Linux uses init levels in order to specify current working mode. Level 6 is used to specify the reboot state. We can use init
command in order to change Level 6 which will reboot the system. By using init related init files will be executed and invoked.
$ init 6