Take the 2-minute tour ×  According to this post menu shutdown
asks each application to save their work prior to shutting down.
Will something more serious happen if one always uses sudo
shutdown -h now to turn off the machine? It works so fast, I am
getting hang of it.  share|improve this question I think the
worst thing that could happen is a corrupted file because it
wasn't closed properly/in the middle of writing. –  NorTicUs Oct
17 '12 at 15:25 I'd use sudo poweroff, but I think they're the
same thing. If you don't you a force option (-f or equivalent),
there's no problem. The program probably halts/kills all your
processes/programs gracefully at the beginning. If you didn't
save your work (e.g. an open document edited in libreoffice),
you might lose your unsaved work. –  medigeek Oct 17 '12 at
15:25 add comment  2 Answers  up vote 17 down vote accepted
None that I am aware of. That is how I shut down all of my
servers. Using the -q options would force a non-graceful
shutdown, but the -h option is fine.