I like the idea of shutdown being more quiet. In my opinion warning logged in users 17 times in four hours is overkill.
While it is possible for a sysadmin to write their own script around shutdown to only publish a few warnings and then call "shutdown now", I think it is better if we silence shutdown directly. Timo suggested there might be a problem if a user logs in and doesn't see the warnings from shutdown and the system goes down by surprise. Luckily this should not be a problem since shutdown blocks new logins. New people, apart from root, cannot sign into a system that is scheduled to shutdown. With this in mind, I'm applying a patch upstream which introduces two new "quiet" flags: -q and -Q The -q flag reduces warning messages from shutdown to once per hour, one at the 10 minute mark and one at the 1 minute mark. The -Q flag prevents all warning messages, apart from the final one when the system really is brought down. The change will appear in sysvinit-2.92. - Jesse (upstream dev)
