Today I just learned that systemctl --force --force reboot is a command. We had a computer we remotely connected to which got permission errors and bus errors when we tried to reboot it normally. For some reason the mentioned command did actually manage to shutdown the computer bit did not manage to reboot it correctly.

I wonder what the double --force flag actually accomplishes and what possibly could hinder a regular reboot in this scenario.

  • Strit
    18•11 days ago

    Instead of just linking to the information, which may be removed in the future, you could have also pasted a snippet of a relevant section. Like:

    If --force is specified twice, the operation is immediately executed without terminating any processes or unmounting any file systems. This may result in data loss. Note that when --force is specified twice the halt operation is executed by systemctl itself, and the system manager is not contacted. This means the command should succeed even when the system manager has crashed.