How does one reboot from an ash shell? [closed]

Question

How does one reboot from an ash shell?

I have an Ubuntu system that is currently bricked for some reason (not pertinent for this question), which means I boot into a BusyBox ash shell. But the exit command does squat, and reset is irrelevant. There must be a better way to reboot than the power button, right?

Propman

Answer 1

I was looking for the same, and my BusyBox installation doesn't have shutdown, restart or reboot commands.

I used poweroff -f because poweroff with no parameters doesn't do anything.

If the previous command doesn't work, try to do a ls -la /bin or a ls -la /sbin to see which commands are available on your BusyBox installation.

As user6214440 stated, if your installation doesn't has a good path environment you should need to execute the command with full path like /sbin/reboot or /sbin/poweroff

Nivernais

Related: For a restart instead of power off, use the reboot command. – Cop

reboot alone did nothing here. Needed do go with the absolute path /bin/reboot. Same goes for poweroff. – Deodorant

Answer 2

tested on BusyBox v1.18.4 (2011-03-18 03:57:01 EDT) multi-call binary

Some BusyBox versions also restart with a forced reboot command:

reboot -f

reboot --help

for more information.

Psychopath

Answer 3

Do you not have the reboot or shutdown commands? reboot without arguments should reboot your box, or 'shutdown -r now' should also do it.

Carolyn

He's probably running a super pared down system, and for whatever reason /sbin is not in his path. Try "/sbin/shutdown -r now". – Tranquilizer

Thanks for the tips: if I'm ever in the same bind, I'll try these. – Propman

Answer 4

On my Alpine box running an ash shell, the command for shutting down completely is poweroff. I noticed it does the same thing as the more familiar shutdown -h now I usually deal with on my CentOS box.

Advocacy

Answer 5

I have a similar "Busy Box" problem but it usually only happens when rebooting after a windows session (which I need for my DAW) I know it's 99% going to busy box so instead of a normal boot I boot to a live USB such as MXlinux 19.x and from there run Gparted it's in the menu under Administration (you need to authorise it with a password and for the live USB I think it's either "root" or "demo".

After it does its thing I look for the partition with Linux on it and invariably it has a triangle with an exclamation mark in it, that the one to check, Right Click it, choose "check" then Click the Tick mark at the top of the window/screen, answer yes to apply and wait for it to check the file system of your partition.

When finished either open a terminal and type reboot or do it however you normally reboot. That's how I fix the problem every time.

Candlestick

Except that you need to reboot in order to launch the live USB Linux operating system. Faced with the ash command line, you can't get there. – Propman