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SHUTDOWN(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual SHUTDOWN(8)
NAME
shutdown, poweroff - close down the system at a given time
SYNOPSIS
shutdown [-] [-c | -h | -p | -r | -k] [-o [-n]] time
[warning-message ...]
poweroff
DESCRIPTION
The shutdown utility provides an automated shutdown procedure for super-
users to nicely notify users when the system is shutting down, saving
them from system administrators, hackers, and gurus, who would otherwise
not bother with such niceties. In order to use the shutdown command, the
user must have root privileges or be a member of the operator group.
The following options are available:
-c The system is power cycled (power turned off and then back on) at
the specified time. If the hardware doesn't support power cycle,
the system will be rebooted. At the present time, only systems
with BMC supported by the ipmi(4) driver that implement this
functionality support this flag. The amount of time the system
is off is dependent on the device that implements this feature.
-h The system is halted at the specified time.
-p The system is halted and the power is turned off (hardware
support required, otherwise the system is halted) at the
specified time.
-r The system is rebooted at the specified time.
-k Kick everybody off. The -k option does not actually halt the
system, but leaves the system multi-user with logins disabled
(for all but super-user).
-o If one of the -c, -h, -p or -r options are specified, shutdown
will execute halt(8) or reboot(8) instead of sending a signal to
init(8).
-n If the -o option is specified, prevent the file system cache from
being flushed by passing -n to halt(8) or reboot(8). This option
should probably not be used.
time Time is the time at which shutdown will bring the system down and
may be the case-insensitive word now (indicating an immediate
shutdown) or a future time in one of two formats: +number, or
yymmddhhmm, where the year, month, and day may be defaulted to
the current system values. The first form brings the system down
in number minutes and the second at the absolute time specified.
+number may be specified in units other than minutes by appending
the corresponding suffix: "s", "sec", "m", "min", "h", "hour".
If an absolute time is specified, but not a date, and that time
today has already passed, shutdown will assume that the same time
tomorrow was meant. (If a complete date is specified which has
already passed, shutdown will print an error and exit without
the standard input.
At intervals, becoming more frequent as apocalypse approaches and
starting at ten hours before shutdown, warning messages are displayed on
the terminals of all users logged in. Five minutes before shutdown, or
immediately if shutdown is in less than 5 minutes, logins are disabled by
creating /var/run/nologin and copying the warning message there. If this
file exists when a user attempts to log in, login(1) prints its contents
and exits. The file is removed just before shutdown exits.
At shutdown time a message is written to the system log, containing the
time of shutdown, the person who initiated the shutdown and the reason.
The corresponding signal is then sent to init(8) to respectively halt,
reboot or bring the system down to single-user state (depending on the
above options). The time of the shutdown and the warning message are
placed in /var/run/nologin and should be used to inform the users about
when the system will be back up and why it is going down (or anything
else).
A scheduled shutdown can be canceled by killing the shutdown process (a
SIGTERM should suffice). The /var/run/nologin file that shutdown created
will be removed automatically.
When run without options, the shutdown utility will place the system into
single user mode at the time specified.
Calling "poweroff" is equivalent to running:
shutdown -p now
FILES
/var/run/nologin tells login(1) not to let anyone log in
EXAMPLES
Reboot the system in 30 minutes and display a warning message on the
terminals of all users currently logged in:
# shutdown -r +30 "System will reboot"
COMPATIBILITY
The hours and minutes in the second time format may be separated by a
colon (``:'') for backward compatibility.
SEE ALSO
kill(1), login(1), wall(1), nologin(5), halt(8), init(8), reboot(8)
HISTORY
A shutdown command was originally written by Ian Johnstone for UNSW's
modified AT&T UNIX 6th Edn. It was modified and then incorporated in
4.1BSD.
FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE November 7, 2022 FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE