Proper way to shut down?

Is there a proper way to shut down the chip when changing batteries or moving device? Is it safe to pull the power or can that cause corruption?

I have never had an issue when just pulling power. You could use ssh to issue a shut down command.

IDEA: option on the menu for admin to shutdown gracefully

Yes that would be nice!
I also hesitate to just pull the power, you never know what it is doing at that time.
I do this:
ssh [email protected]
(password is outernet by default)
sudo halt
(type password again)

But a menu button (of course only available when logged on as outernet) would be nice.

Doesn’t sudo halt perform an immediate unclean shutdown? I have always been told to use sudo halt as an absolute last resort as it can cause data corruption almost like pulling the power. I always use sudo shutdown.

Negative. Check out its options…

Usage: halt [-d DELAY] [-n] [-f] [-w]

Halt the system

        -d SEC  Delay interval
        -n      Do not sync
        -f      Force (don't go through init)
        -w      Only write a wtmp record

Perfectly safe on this platform. However, other platforms may not map this command in the same way.

No, on Linux systems the “shutdown”, “reboot” and “halt” programs are just the same thing with
different defaults. shutdown by default sends messages to logged on users and waits a while for
giving them the opportunity to save their work and log off, but on something like an Outernet CHIP
(or another basically single-user system) that is pointless.