Restart without a Reboot

A restart and a reboot are the same thing.

You may achieve what you want by logging out and back in. That's a "restart" of your account without restarting the whole system. It will clear and reset things limited to your account, and will re-run all/any of your personal login items. Use "Log Out" from the Apple menu (Cmnd-Shift-Q) and you will be greeted by the usual login screen.

No idea what 'running at level one' means, but one could argue as follows:

A restart is where you click 'restart' and the Mac closes all applications as well as the operating system, but does not switch off but merely spins down the HD, spins up again and restarts again, thus re-setting the system. This is what you do, for example, after installing an update.

A reboot is when you shut down the computer, i.e. when the entire system switches off, the HD spins to zero, and the power is cut off. Then you have to use the power button to start the whole thing up again.

But I still have no idea what you want to achieve.

Aside from speaking "over the heads" of most Mac users not familiar with UNIX or BSD administration, you are applying UNIX conventions to FreeBSD, and its children.

FreeBSD, et al., does not have runlevels. If you want to drop into single user mode, i.e., runlevel 1, you can try, at a terminal, as root (or an admin user in the group wheel with sudo permissions):

# shutdown now

% man shutdown

naturally has more information. Do not use halt (`man 8 halt') this will power off the system.

Once in single user mode, there are ways to return to the standard "multi-user" mode. I'll have to Google that...

YMMV. You might have a problem testing this if you are already in the middle of your competition. Sorry.


HTH,
Tim




PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Aside from speaking "over the heads" of most Mac
users not familiar with UNIX or BSD administration,
you are applying UNIX conventions to FreeBSD,
and its children.

FreeBSD, et al., does not have runlevels. If you want
to drop into single user mode, i.e., runlevel
1, you can try, at a terminal, as root (or an
admin user in the group wheel with sudo
permissions):

# shutdown now

% man shutdown

naturally has more information. Do not use halt (`man
8 halt') this will power off the system.

Once in single user mode, there are ways to return to
the standard "multi-user" mode. I'll have to Google
that...

YMMV. You might have a problem testing this if you
are already in the middle of your competition.
Sorry.

This may not actually work in Tiger's version of FreeBSD; I did the experimentation for you.

To get to Single User Mode on Mac OS X, you need to reboot, then hold command-S. But this is the chicken before the egg problem (or did they solve that one?). Anyway, some Googling might be of further help.

Regards,
Tim


PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

In Jaguar you could bring the OS down to single user mode with shutdown +0. The kernel is now configured so that it is imposible to lower kern.securelevel.