How can I cancel (abort) a shutdown when I see "A stop job is running..."?

Question

I entered sudo shutdown -h now to shutdown my computer. Then, the "A stop job is running..." message appeared. I wanted to abort my shutdown and go back to appropriately closing the running programs... but I couldn't find a way to cancel my shutdown so all I could do was wait for the shutdown to continue.

Most of the guidance I find online are focused on forcing immediate shutdown whereas I want to stop the shutdown. Is it possible to abort the shutdown in this situation?

Environment: Debian, XFCE, xfce4-terminal, Bash

Answer 1

that "a stop job is running" is visible when you're already pretty much at the end of what systemd could shutdown so far.

At this point, you're not able to have an interactive session anymore; you'd need to "boot back" up to the multiuser target. That's technically not possible, and it would also not allow you to save anything: That interactive program that (you assume, it's hard to check!) blocks shutdown has long lost its graphical interface, it can't be interacted with anymore, even if you restarted X11/your wayland compositor.

So, I'm afraid what you want cannot exist!