After a brief write up the other day I thought I would expand abit on the shutdown command and what i’ve been using it for.

The shutdown command allows you to “imaginativly” shutdown the computer from a Dos command. Common switches include -s for shutdown -r for reboot -f to force it to shutdown incase you have a stubborn app still loaded, and -t xx for time in seconds until shutdown. Also you can specific a -m COMPUTERNAME to specify a remote computer you want this to run on.

So a few examples of the command would start out and simply

SHUTDOWN -S

This would start a countdown of 30 seconds (whilst displaying a warning message) and would start the shutdown proceedure imediatly after the time has elapsed.

SHUTDOWN -S -T 10

This would do the same as above but start the timer at 10 seconds

SHUTDOWN -R -M \\HOMEPC

This would make the remote computer HOMEPC restart after the 30 second countdown.

IMPORTANT: at any point in the countdown you can type SHUTDOWN -A to abort the shutdown.

So I’ve used it at work this week as part of a scheduled task for a users pc. I was running a few diags on the machine and also doing a defrag, as I didnt want to sit there and watch it I started the scheduled task wizard and pointed it to the shutdown file located in %winddir%\system32 and then added the switches to it. Then it was just a case of following the wizard to get the machine to power itself off a 9pm. User didnt say anything the next morning so i assume it all went according to plan.