I'd like to have a quick way to halt my system from the keyboard, without relying on obscure key combinations such as Alt-Up. Logging in as a special user (with a special password) would be ideal. And I saw that a "halt" user already exists, with /sbin/halt as a login shell, so someone must have thought of this. But as it is, it doesn't work: even if I give the "halt" user a password (by running "passwd halt" as root), I get "Login incorrect" when I in fact try to login as that user.
Moreover, I don't see how it _could_ possibly work: the uid of "halt" is 7, and /sbin/halt is not suid, so how could the process inherited from login, with uid 7, send a signal to pid 1 - which is IIRC how halting functions? I must be missing something important. (No systemd here, if it wasn't already obvious.) -- Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.
