Shutting the computer down from Openbox

Question

I've recently installed Openbox,and read a guide that said the PC should be shut down via this command:

gdm-control --shutdown && openbox --exit

However, it seems a bit counter intuitive. Why would I shut the computer down first and then exit Openbox? How is that even possible?

Or is it maybe that gdm-control --shutdown just sends a message somewhere? What if the computer shuts down before Openbox can exit? Is this really "the right way"?

Info:

Link to Openbox guide: http://urukrama.wordpress.com/openbox-guide/
OS: Debian Linux 7.0

Answer 1

Make an alias like this. Then just type shut.

alias shut="su -c 'shutdown -h now'"

You need to be root to do it, that's why you first set the user to superuser (su), then issue the command (-c). The -h is for "halt" after shutdown, i.e., don't reboot (or do anything else).

Answer 2

I'm a bite late to the party, but to answer the question how is that even possible, the man page for gdm-control says it all:

DESCRIPTION
       gdm-control lets you control gdm from within an X session.  It enables
       you to change GDM's behaviour for when you end the current sesson.  For
       instance, you can tell GDM to reboot, and then immediately log out of
       the current session, and the computer will be rebooted
OPTIONS

       ...<snip>...

       --shutdown
            Shutdown the computer when the current session ends.

So you tell gdm to shutdown when the session ends, then end the session.

For myself, I tried what was suggested in this question and found that systemctl poweroff worked fine for me.