Thanks to the author who took the time to bring up the question that was bothering me for years. Especially when poor program logic messed up time critical processes. And the shutdown process in Linux is very messed up. For example, I've disabled sleep-on-lid close, but, nevertheless, when I initiate the shutdown and close the laptop, I may come in an hour, open up the lid - only to see "Shutting down, bye. Blink.". If the battery haven't died, that is. Turns out the laptop falls "asleep" in the middle of shutdown and when resurrected, continues to run a few remaining shutdown procedures. And a bit less fun, but weird, no less case: if you happen to mount some SMB shares like "mount -t cifs //..." (even by IP), gods save you from pulling the plugs! Because if you do, like me, press the power button, happily unplug the mouse, audio, and etherenet, you're in a bit of a situation: "Unmounting /mnt/myfreakinhomeserver/"... 10 minutes or so. And, until you plug the cable back in and pray it hooks up as it was (because who knows if the auth still works), Linux won't shut down. Na-ah. Not a chance. But, unfortunately, one can't just hit CTRL+S (save) on everything and pull the plug. Things need to be saved, states maintained, registers written, telemetry sent (yeah, right :) hello, ms-canonical). And I fully understand, that the OSI model works against us in my SMB share case: the FS layer probably doesn't know it's a network share, and the network subsystem may not know that we're shutting down and may drop everything immediately, etc. etc. Well, what can we do... was I asking myself until today. Thanks for the food for thought! (fixed grammar)