[gentoo-user] What is the "halt" user for?

[Ian Zimmerman]

I'd like to have a quick way to halt my system from the keyboard,
without relying on obscure key combinations such as Alt-Up.  Logging in
as a special user (with a special password) would be ideal.  And I saw
that a "halt" user already exists, with /sbin/halt as a login shell, so
someone must have thought of this.  But as it is, it doesn't work: even
if I give the "halt" user a password (by running "passwd halt" as root),
I get "Login incorrect" when I in fact try to login as that user.

Moreover, I don't see how it _could_ possibly work: the uid of "halt" is
7, and /sbin/halt is not suid, so how could the process inherited from
login, with uid 7, send a signal to pid 1 - which is IIRC how halting
functions?  I must be missing something important.

(No systemd here, if it wasn't already obvious.)

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