shutdown(3)

okay so bestie, we're in the Arcan Lua API and the page is shutdown(3) — yes, manual name folded in right at the top, we love a self-referential moment 👑✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

shutdown — queue a shutdown event. That's the icon: you're asking the engine to shut down, but the request goes through the queue first 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

the signature is literally:

nil
shutdown( optmsg, optcode )

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

This function will shut down the engine and terminate the process when it's deemed safe — no cap. The important part is that it will not happen immediately; instead, an event gets queued internally so frameservers and other pending-data related tasks have time to clean up 🧚✨

it's giving "graceful exit era" — the shutdown is queued, not instant, so cleanup can happen first 💅

The system's interpretation of optcode varies with the underlying environment, though the EXIT_SUCCESS and EXIT_FAILURE constants are propagated and useful here. There's also a special constant, EXIT_SILENT, that will return an EXIT_SUCCESS to the outer system, but only signal a 'display server lost' action to external clients, rather than asking them to shut down 🌈

🎀 NOTES 🎀

1. by default, the exit code corresponds to system EXIT_SUCCESS, but it can be set to a custom value through optcode. 💖
2. optmsg is filtered to only accept [a-Z,.0-9] and whitespace. 🧚

🦋 EXAMPLE 🦋

first demo — shutdown0() just calls it with no args:

function shutdown0()
      return shutdown();
end

🦋 EXAMPLE 🦋

second demo — shutdown1() passes a message and a code:

function shutdown1()
      return shutdown("giving up", -1);
end

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mwah 💋 — this page is from the system source/version, dated October 2026, and that's the footer tea, periodt. 🫶