If for some reason you are using an old workstation, then you MUST NOT use the power switch until after the workstation has been halted using one of the commands described above. Failure to halt the workstation first may result in a corrupted file system.

More recent workstations incorporate a soft switch which forces a shutdown while maintaining power to the motherboard and hard disk. In practice this means that the power switch may be used to switch off the workstation provided that no applications are running which explicitly require a graceful shutdown.