Boris, I don't know about the other issues, but if 'shutdown immediate' was Control-ced and it never came back to the prompt (i.e. hung), then you will have to kill the sqlplus session itself. In that case, you will not be able to relogin... It seems in your case, you reused the same session and did not have to relogin. John -----Original Message----- From: Boris Dali [mailto:boris_dali@xxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 11:33 AM To: John Kanagaraj; roger_xu@xxxxxxxxxxx; Oracle-L@Freelists Subject: RE: hanging shutdowns (addressing the requirement for a UNIX reboot) John, > This is because once you initiate a 'shutdown immediate' and > 'control-c'ed out of it, then you will never be able to login since > any new attaches will complain that a shutdown is in progress, and the > only way out is to kill the backend processes. This must be platform specific. Here's for instance how it works for me in Oracle 9.2.0.6 on Linux: SQL> sho release release 902000600 SQL> shutdown immediate; -- and Ctrl-C ORA-01013: user requested cancel of current operation SQL> shutdown abort; -- no problem to abort ORACLE instance shut down. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l