*BSD News Article 68912


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: How to trap CTRL-ALT-DEL
Date: 19 May 1996 12:46:31 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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Michael White <mdwhite@ucdavis.edu> wrote:

> Okay, after a month and a half of wrangling with Linux and FreeBSD
> I finally get FreeBSD 2.1 to work with my hardware (Linux refused).
> Now, a friend tells me that CTRL-ALT-DEL should be trapped by the
> system and execute a shutdown -r now.  It doesn't.  My partitions
> are gone.  So I have a question: how does one trap the CTRL-ALT-DEL
> so that it won't trash my system?

ctrl-alt-del executes the function ``shutdown_nice()'' inside the
console driver.  It is expected to send a signal to the running
init(8) program in order to get the system rebooted.  It used to work
fine in multiuser mode, but had a few problems in particular in
situations (like UserConfig) where init wasn't even running yet.

``My partitions are gone.''  Can you explain this in more detail?
Even for a total crash (or a power-cycle), the system is not supposed
to write anything dangerous to your disk.  The only anticipated
problem is that your file systems are unclean and need repair (and
might have lost data that wasn't on the disk yet).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)