Shutdown does not power off. Why?

Question

I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I am having problems shutting down and restarting the computer. I trigger a shutdown, the computer eventually says

Reached target shutdown

and halts. It does not power off.

So, what problem may I have and what should I do to solve it?

Please [edit] your question and include the details you added in the comments. Also tell us something about your hardware. Is this a laptop? A desktop? Are you connected to a network? Are you mounting any remote shares from the network? — terdon, Jul 23 '18 at 15:33
You still haven't followed the standard litany and told the world what you did to trigger the shutdown. For all we know, shutting down to halt is exactly what you told the computer to do. — JdeBP, Jul 23 '18 at 15:33
An example of what we need to help you: https://askubuntu.com/questions/632591/system-does-not-power-off-on-poweroff-just-halts — andcoz, Jul 24 '18 at 13:01

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 11 '20 at 14:16

As @JdeBP said, you have not clarified what exactly you did. However, the answer to your questions may lie in the man page:

man shutdown

Which tells us,

shutdown may be used to halt, power-off or reboot the machine.

So for your questions,

I am having problems shutting down and restarting the computer

It does not power off

to reboot, you should run (if you didn't already),

shutdown -r

and if you're trying to power off,

shutdown -P

Enjoy https://superuser.com/a/900205/38062 , https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/196014/5132 , and https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/196471/5132 as well. — JdeBP, Jul 23 '18 at 17:04

1 Answers1