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There are times (emergencies, impending power failures, drinks spilled on the tower, etc.) where shutting down one's machine now (preferably by disconnecting the power cord) is the best course of action.

Of course, this can be potentially dangerous as it can cause heavy data loss, both on the filesystem side and the application side. The filesystem doesn't sync and may get some inconsistencies (not a problem with ext4, but I'd rather not fix NTFS again), which are either a pain to repair or are (somehow) irreparably damaged. Similarly, applications not getting the ability to gracefully kill themselves just to give them a chance to quickly save any data again has the chance to be excruciatingly annoying.

Therefore, in the event of a sudden-poweroff situation, what steps (if any) can I take to ensure that my system is in a (relatively) clean state when I'm forced to pull the plug?

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  • 1
    Possible duplicate of Hotkey to shut down from login screen?
    – user68186
    Dec 31, 2016 at 18:38
  • @user68186 could you explain how this is a dupe of the linked question? Dec 31, 2016 at 18:48
  • It seemed you need to press the combination of the hotkeys before yanking the plug. You may want to part of the way of the REISUO chain, depending on what you want to achieve. I will retract the vote, but keep the comment.
    – user68186
    Dec 31, 2016 at 18:53
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    See this link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
    – sudodus
    Dec 31, 2016 at 19:03
  • Looks like Alt+SysRq+R+E+I+S before yanking the power cable would be a good idea.
    – user68186
    Dec 31, 2016 at 19:20

1 Answer 1

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You can hold Ctrl+Alt+PrintScreen and then type the keys REISUB for emergency unmounting of drives and rebooting.

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  • FTR Ctrl+Alt+PrintScreen brings up the screen snapshot utility on my Wireless Logitech K800 keyboard. Jan 1, 2017 at 3:31

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