Proper way to shutdown a slave

There is a right way to stop a MySQL slave server and a wrong way. The wrong way is to simply shutdown the mysql server which can cause problems when starting up the server and slave.

The proper way to stop a slave server is to first issue "STOP SLAVE" and then shutdown the server. Here's how you can shutdown slave on multiple MySQL hosts.

cat /lists/dbs | while read i ; do echo $i; /path/to/mysql -h $i -e "STOP SLAVE"; done

Here's another way (thanks Toby for the alternative one liner to run a command against multiple hosts):

xargs -n 1 mysql -e "STOP SLAVE" -h < /lists/dbs

Stopping the slave first will ensure that the replication thread is stopped before the server goes down.