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What easiest way to turn off/shut down the raspberry pi 3 model b? Would it be easier to just pull out my power source plug or to click menu --> shutdown --> shutdown and pull the plug or does it just do the same thing?

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    Do not just pull the cord it can cause SD card corruption and th Pi not to boot. Use the menu. If you need to disconnect the power (to reboot for example) the best practice is to disconnect it at the wall not the Pi (this avoids wear to the connector).
    – Steve Robillard
    Commented Jun 26, 2016 at 4:41
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    @SteveRobillard You may mean wear on the plug. µUSB sockets are rated for 10K insertions, so it is unlikely you could ever wear one out.
    – Milliways
    Commented Jun 26, 2016 at 6:16
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    @Milliways I have to agree with Steve. Your wall outlet is rated even higher, not to mention some PSUs will spike from a no load situation. So if you plug in a hot PSU that does this, by by pi. Also to add, the socket may be rated at 10k, but it is the solder connections that usually break first at the board.
    – Dan V
    Commented Jun 26, 2016 at 8:29
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    Alternately, in a terminal window you can issue this command: sudo init 0 - Runlevel zero means it is off. Always watch the lights to make sure it finishes flushing out any cached disk writes before turning off power to protect the file system.
    – SDsolar
    Commented Mar 21, 2018 at 23:00

1 Answer 1

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Do not pull the plug until the OS has shutdown completely. If you do, you risk corrupting the SD card and then needing to reformat and re-install. You can power down from the menu, once the green activity light goes off permanently and your display is off, you can safely assume the OS is done powering down and you can pull the plug. If you fancy the command-line, there's a command (poweroff) that will blink the green light 10 times once it's safe to unplug the Pi.

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  • This sounds like a job for Win32DiskImager - to make sure there is a fresh, known good image copy of the SD card on hand.
    – SDsolar
    Commented Jun 2, 2017 at 17:42

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