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I ran shutdown from within an ssh session but my instance still shows up as running when I query it with DescribeInstances and I can shell into it. Whats happening?

April 26, 2017instance query ran running session Shell shows shutdown SSH

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I ran shutdown from within an ssh session but my instance still shows up as running when I query it with DescribeInstances and I can shell into it. Whats happening?

1 Answer

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This is a “feature” of the shutdown command. If you issue shutdown without a -h (halt) flag it shuts down the network and switches to single user mode. The instance is still running but without a network. You should always use shutdown -h when working inside an Amazon EC2 instance. You can shut the instance down using the TerminateInstances call (ec2-terminate on the command line).