Glossary

shutdown

shutdown is the traditional command for halting, powering off, or rebooting the system. It supports scheduling and a message broadcast to logged-in users, features cron jobs and sysadmins have long relied on.

sudo shutdown -h now             # halt immediately
sudo shutdown -P +5              # power off in 5 minutes
sudo shutdown -r 23:00           # reboot at 23:00
sudo shutdown -c                 # cancel a pending shutdown
sudo shutdown -k +10 "Maintenance" # send warning only, no actual shutdown

On systemd systems shutdown delegates to systemctl poweroff / systemctl reboot, so its behaviour is consistent with the rest of the service-manager ecosystem.

Related terms: reboot, halt, poweroff, systemctl

Discussed in:

This site is currently in Beta. Contact: Chris Paton

Textbook of AI · Textbook of Usability · Textbook of Digital Health

Auckland Maths and Science Tutoring

AI tools used: Claude (research, coding, text), ChatGPT (diagrams, images), Grammarly (editing).