# shutdown doesn't

## Gentree

I have problem from time to time with shutting dowm the system. I have an alias to turn off and this usually works fine.

```
alias off='shutdown -h now'

```

Hwvr, if I have certain processes stalled - eg my emerge PHP which is currently getting stuck - I cant shutdown . I have to use cntl-alt-bkspc to turn off.

In this case I get the broadcast msg on all terminais but nothing actually shuts down and I can still type commands from the open terminals.

Same goes to reboot -n

Is this normal behaviour, or something I should correct?

Thanks for any advice, Gentree  :Cool: 

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## curtis119

I could be totally wrong about this but: Are you running that shutdown command from a user account or as root? If it's a user account then it cannot kill the stalled process due to permissions. If you run the shutdown command as root (or sudo) it should then have the proper permissions to kill the stalled process.

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## Gentree

No , as root.

also , I cant kill the processes manually:

kill -9 pid  has no effect.

 :Question: 

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