Linux Shutdown Management

Last Updated: Wed, Jul 8, 2009

The Commands

Here are a few example of all the ways we can shutdown and reboot on a nix machine.

Power off the Machine Now

sudo halt

Shutdown 10 Minutes From Now

sudo shutdown -h +10 'Shutting down in 5 minutes!'

Reboot at 11pm

sudo shutdown -r 23:00

Cancel That

If you decide you don’t need to shutdown after all you can issue a cancel command like this:

sudo shutdown -c

Give a Shutdown Warning Without Actually Shutting Down

sudo shutdown -k now 'Hey I am going to the server room and this computer might get unplugged.  Please save your work.'

Waking your Computer up

Here’s a command that tells your computer to wake up 5 minutes from now. To try enter the command and shut your computer down.

echo "+00-00-00 00:05:00" > /proc/acpi/alarm

Reboot Daily with Cron

Open up cron as root with, ‘sudo crontab -e’ and add the following line to reboot each night at 11:55pm.

55 23 * * * reboot