MacOS – Are OS X shutdown cause and sleep cause numbers listed/explained anywhere

macosrestartshutdown

The numbers in which I'm most interested

-2
0
3
5

… I might add to that shortlist.

What do those numbers mean; where might we find authoritative explanations?

Somewhere in Apple open source, maybe?

Background

There's a suggested answer for -60, a question about -81, a debatable suggested answer for -108, discussion of -128, -72, -62, -30, -2, 0, 3 … and so on, but unless I'm missing something:

nothing like an Apple-provided list of explanations of the commonly seen numbers.

Examples

Three messages recently sent by kernel on a MacBookPro5,2:

2014-03-31 09:04:49.000 kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 5
2014-03-31 11:01:24.000 kernel[0]: Previous Sleep Cause: 5
2014-03-31 14:47:00.000 kernel[0]: |Previous Shutdown Cause: -60

Possibly relevant to some cause numbers

Error codes in http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CarbonHeaders/CarbonHeaders-18.1/MacErrors.h

that's in Apple open source for Mac OS X 10.6.2 but not in open source for Mac OS X 10.6.3
the source code for 10.6.2 is almost identical to what's installed under MacOSX10.8.sdk
it may be sensible to treat some of those error codes as deprecated.

Best Answer

The precise meaning of the codes is not publicly documented, although according to @grgarside's website for Shutdown Causes, the causes for the ones listed in the question are:

5

Correct Shut Down. Shutdown was initiated, from the OS X Shut Down menu or other shutdown command. This normally does not indicate an issue with your system.
3

Hard shutdown. Check power button.
0

Power disconnected. Check power supply/battery.
-2

vTypErr = -2, /*invalid queue element*/

Most likely it's a hardware issue such as faulty logic board, a video card or RAM.

Related:
- Previous Shutdown Cause: -2
- macOs Sierra "previous shutdown cause: -2"?

For a full up-to-date list, see Shutdown Causes.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Shutdown Cause -108

According to this page, Shutdown Cause -108 seems to be due to a lack of memory.

MacOS Terminal Commands – Shutdown, Restart, and Sleep Your Mac

The command you are after is shutdown. This informs all users that the machine is going to be shutdown and tells all apps to close files etc.

The command takes a parameter -h, -r or -s to shut down, restart or sleep the Mac.

The command has to be run as root so you need to use sudo.

e.g. to reboot the machine immediately

sudo shutdown -r now

e.g. to shutdown the machine in 60 minutes

sudo shutdown -h +60

From comments there are two things to be addressed

How shutdown works is by sending a sigterm to all processes which should then deal with that e.g. save open files etc. If they don't exit then they will get sent a SIGKILL which forces them to die with no chance to respond. The signals are not sent via the normal key message queue so Apps have to deal with this separately to the code that gets called from quit on the menu. A good app should call common code from both.

This other answer shows how to shutdown as if you hit the menu options. But note that apps can cancel this shutdown