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Possible Duplicate:
Difference between menu shutdown and 'shutdown -h now'

Why can ubuntu perform a shutdown from the GUI even though it is prive on the command line? By what mechanism does it do so?

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^Not a duplicate, read that already. – awiebe Feb 3 '12 at 0:54
@awiebe Can you please edit your question to make more sense? I am finding it hard to understand how this is not a duplicate? – Jorge Castro Feb 3 '12 at 20:20
IMO, awebie asked about the mechanism that allows doing the shutdown without root privileges. – krlmlr Feb 3 '12 at 21:09

marked as duplicate by Bruno Pereira♦, bodhi.zazen, Jacob Johan Edwards, htorque, fossfreedom♦ Feb 3 '12 at 21:11

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1 Answer

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The mechanism seems to be a DBus message, sent to a process with root privileges. Taken from How can I make shutdown not require admin password?:

Shutdown:

dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal \
          /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer \
          org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement.Shutdown
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