Section 8 · System administration

shutdown.8

Package: systemd

SHUTDOWN

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
EXIT STATUS
COMPATIBILITY
SEE ALSO

NAME

shutdown − Halt, power off or reboot the machine

SYNOPSIS


	shutdown [OPTIONS…] [TIME] [WALL…]

DESCRIPTION

shutdown may be used to halt, power off, or reboot the machine.

The first argument may be a time string (which is usually “now”). Optionally, this may be followed by a wall message to be sent to all logged−in users before going down.

The time string may either be in the format “hh:mm” for hour/minutes specifying the time to execute the shutdown at, specified in 24h clock format. Alternatively it may be in the syntax “+m” referring to the specified number of minutes m from now. “now” is an alias for “+0”, i.e. for triggering an immediate shutdown. If no time argument is specified, “+1” is implied.

Note that to specify a wall message you must specify a time argument, too.

If the time argument is used, 5 minutes before the system goes down the /run/nologin file is created to ensure that further logins shall not be allowed.

OPTIONS

The following options are understood:

−−help

Print a short help text and exit.

−H, −−halt

Halt the machine.

−P, −−poweroff

Power the machine off (the default).

−r, −−reboot

Reboot the machine.

−h

The same as −−poweroff, but does not override the action to take if it is “halt”. E.g. shutdown −−reboot −h means “poweroff”, but shutdown −−halt −h means “halt”.

−k

Do not halt, power off, or reboot, but just write the wall message.

−−no−wall

Do not send wall message before halt, power off, or reboot.

−c

Cancel a pending shutdown. This may be used to cancel the effect of an invocation of shutdown with a time argument that is not “+0” or “now”.

−−show

Show a pending shutdown action and time if there is any.

Added in version 250.

EXIT STATUS

On success, 0 is returned, a non−zero failure code otherwise.

COMPATIBILITY

The **
shutdown** command in previous init systems (including sysvinit) defaulted to single−user mode instead of powering off the machine. To change into single−user mode, use systemctl rescue instead.