shutdown

systemd

shutdown

Halt, power off or reboot the machine

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.

The time string specifies the earliest point in time the shutdown may take place; it is a lower bound only: the shutdown is executed as soon as possible, but not before the specified time. Specifying a time that already elapsed (for example an hh:mm time earlier today) is not an error and results in an immediate shutdown. See the discussion of --when= in systemctl(1) for details.

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

-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.

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.