ok, i know the syntax that goes along with the Shutdown command... but my box never wants to ... well... shutdown.. it only halts, kills all the process's, stalls the comp to a complete stop, but does actually kill the monitor and/or shut off the physical computer. it will reboot properly though, but i dotn want it to start back up, i just want it to shutoff completely.

some help would be appreciated, thnx. oh, and why doesnt the command system("logout"); work in c/c++ ??.. is it because it wont terminate the program running that line??.

What is the system that you are trying to shutdown? Is it your desktop, or is it a server? Also what is the OS that you are using? Can you post the output of 'uname -a'?

try this: shutdown -h now

im running slackware 3.3, its my personal laptop, no server-side anything.
im logged in as root most of the time, im not in a situation where im physically interacting with the laptop at the moment, so i cannot respond to the uname -a part, but i will in a little later..

and shutdown -h now.... just means to halt now... ive tried that, as well as shutdown -n -h now in hopes to give a quick kill, but to no avail..