Hi guys. I just did a man shutdown on a new CentOS 6.3 box, and realized there is no -F option for the shutdown command. I haven't loaded a new RHEL server in a while, but the last one I did, its shutdown command still had a -F option.
Aren't they supposed to be the same for the most part, so why would there not be a -F?

IMHO a better question would be "can I fix this" or "what are the alternatives" (forcefsck GRUB arg, touch /.forcefsck).

ha, ok, you got me there.

But I really am curious as to why it would not be there. Like is there a good reason, as in -F is "old school" and shouldn't be used anymore, isn't really standard to begin with, or something else perhaps.

If you really are curious then IMHO there's no better place to start than 'rpm -q --changelog $(rpm -qf /sbin/shutdown --qf="%{name}\n") | less' or the .src.rpm wrt patches against the tarball or 'rlog' the upstream source.

Very cool! Did the rpm one and don't see any mention of it in the change log. the other things you said I don't exactly know what those are.

'rpm -qf /sbin/shutdown' shows you the name of the package /sbin/shutdown is part of. That package was built from a source RPM (which has a ".src.rpm" extension). If you load the source repo in Yum you should be able to 'yum --downloadonly' the .src.rpm and explode it with 'rpm2cpio' to check its contents (tarball, .spec file, patches). From reading the tarball README or spending 3 seconds with your favorite search engine you should be able to locate the upstream source, the way it announces changes (web page, mailing list, source repo, whatever else) and the source itself (http, cvs, svn, git, hg, whatever else).

wow, pretty intense, i'll have to check that out.