shutdown Archives • Linux Tips

Reboot From The Terminal

The weather has had a bit of an impact on my internet connection, so this is just going to be a quick article about how you reboot from the terminal. I want to schedule this as soon as possible, so it’ll be a fairly low-effort article. This should not take long!

There are times when you may want to know how to reboot from the terminal. Then, there are times when you can’t access a GUI, and using the terminal is the cleanest method of rebooting your computer. Knowing how to reboot from the terminal might be a skill worth having. I’ll show you a couple of quick and easy ways to do this.

As the title says, this is going to take place in the terminal. You can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T to open your default terminal. You could otherwise reboot with REISUB.

So, with your terminal open…

Reboot With systemd:

The first command we’ll use to reboot your computer. We’ll be using systemd. This will only work if you’re using a distro with systemd.

sudo systemctl reboot

1	sudo systemctl reboot

Reboot With shutdown:

It should be fairly obvious that the shutdown command can be used to reboot your computer. This is one of the generic utilities, so you won’t need to install anything.

sudo shutdown -h now

1	sudo shutdown -h now

(Check the man page because there are a lot of options available.)

Reboot With reboot:

Finally, we’ll use the reboot command to reboot your computer. This might be the easiest to remember and you shouldn’t need to install anything new. You need the following command:

sudo reboot now

1	sudo reboot now

In some distros, you can drop the ‘now’ and the command will still reboot your computer immediately.

Closure:

So, there you have it. You have a new article and it should even be published on time. It’s not a long article. The subject is easy enough. You’ll never know when you need to reboot from the terminal, and now you do.

Ah well…

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Let’s Learn About Halt

Today’s article is about the halt command. The reason we’re writing about the halt command today is because I was halfway through another article before I realized I’d already written an article on that subject. So, this is going to just be a nice, easy article.

And, yes, yes I did write more than half of an article that I’ve already written. I ain’t even intoxicated!

The command we’re looking at using today is called ‘halt’. For such a little command, here’s an interesting post about the difference between halt and shutdown. And, if that’s not enough, you can read the other answers and comments on that page.

Anyhow, halt is described like this in the man page:

halt, poweroff, reboot – Halt, power-off or reboot the machine

Of those three, we’ll just be covering the halt. Yes, the man page contains all three in just one page. They’re all related. As I said, we’ll just be covering the useful features of halt command today.

And, without further ado…

The Halt Command:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you have the terminal open, the first use of halt would be just to halt the system:

halt

halt

That will halt your CPU. It probably won’t shutdown your computer all the way, it will just stop it. So too won’t the -f (force) flag. If you force it, it just stops the CPU. It looks like and requires sudo:

sudo halt -f

1	sudo halt -f

Finally, of the options we’ll cover, is the -p flag, and the -p stands for poweroff. It’s just another way to shut down your computer, and it obviously looks like this:

sudo halt -p

1	sudo halt -p

Those are about the only ways you’re ever going to use it, if you use it at all. It’s not a command that you’re likely to bump into but now you know it exists and how to use it.

Closure:

There you have it, another article. This one covers the halt command in Linux. It’s not a major article, but I needed one in a hurry – just to ensure there’s one scheduled. While my health is mostly returned, I’m still not so caught up that I have a bunch of extra articles. Feel free to step up and write one or two!

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How To: Shutdown Linux From The Terminal

Today’s article is going to tell you how to shutdown from the terminal. I’ve previously explained how to reboot a ‘frozen’ Linux system using the Magic SysReq keys. Today, we’ll shutdown from the terminal. It’s a quick and easy article – as the holidays are eating a bit of my “free” time.

Why would you want to do this? Well, if your Linux system isn’t quite frozen or your desktop GUI isn’t something you can reach, then you may want to press something like CTRL + ALT + F3. That should crack open a TTY where you can login and issue commands to your system. Maybe you’re working on a server and need to shut it down? Who knows, but the command is there and it’s a useful command to keep in mind.

For this article, we’ll mostly be using the shutdown command, and the man page defines it as:

shutdown – Halt, power-off or reboot the machine

And it does pretty much what you’d expect from such a command. However, it’s not just a basic command, there are flags and some options that go along with it. So, we might as well take the time to learn about it. After all, you never know when you want to shutdown Linux from the terminal.

Shutdown Linux From The Terminal:

Like oh so many articles, this one will require an open terminal. If you’re connected to a remote server via SSH, you already have a terminal to work with. If not, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you’re ready to shutdown your Linux system, you can enter the following to shutdown immediately:

sudo shutdown now

1	sudo shutdown now

Obviously, that command will shutdown the system immediately, so don’t practice it unless you plan on shutting down – ’cause you will. You can even shutdown at a specific time by using this format (and 24h time):

sudo shutdown HH:MM

1	sudo shutdown HH:MM

You can also use the +MM function. To shutdown in 10 minutes, you’d use a command like this:

sudo shutdown +10

1	sudo shutdown +10

If you change that +10 to +0, it will also shutdown immediately. If you have users of the system who should be notified of an impending shutdown, then you can actually send them a message. That would look like:

sudo shutdown +<time> "<message_to_users>"

1	sudo shutdown +<time> "<message_to_users>"

So, what happens if you schedule a shutdown and need to stop it for some reason? Fortunately, the shutdown command will let you cancel an impending shutdown – so long as you get there in time. That’s done with the -c flag, of course.

sudo shutdown -c

1	sudo shutdown -c

If your cancellation will impact the users, you can even include a message in that. It’s done like this:

sudo shutdown -c "<message_to_users>"

1	sudo shutdown -c "<message_to_users>"

And that’s about it, really. There’s a bit more to the shutdown command, but it’s mostly going to be used in one of the ways mentioned in this article. If you want more information about the shutdown command, simply run man shutdown and read the help file.

Closure:

And there’s another article. This one will tell you how to shutdown Linux from the terminal, a handy skill to have as a user or as an admin. It may seem like a pretty basic command, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be included on the site.