Scheduling a system shutdown at a specific time on Linux

August 26th 2013

Sometimes, when you're running a long task, you might need to schedule a shutdown of your machine for sometime in the future.

Thankfully, the 'shutdown' command has this built in.

In Linux, you can schedule your computer (or server) to shutdown (poweroff) at a specific time or a specific number of minutes in the future.

To schedule a shutdown at 11pm you can issue:

Text Snippet:


$ sudo shutdown -P 23:00

Likewise, if you want to shut your machine down in 2 hours time, you can issue:

Text Snippet:


$ sudo shutdown -P 120

Basically, the 120 above represents the number of minutes in 2 hours.

Now, running that command in your terminal will leave a process running, which we don't actually want. So if you add an ampersand (&) on the end, it'll send the command and run in the background.

The above commands would become:

Text Snippet:


$ sudo shutdown -P 23:00 &

Likewise, if you want to shut your machine down in 2 hours time, you can issue:

Text Snippet:


$ sudo shutdown -P 120 &

Easy to use, and VERY useful. Especially if you're doing something and need to schedule a shutdown.

Issuing the command will also send a message to any logged in users and let them know that the machine will shutdown. This way they know to log out before the system shuts down.

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