On linux, you can do a shutdown -r 17:00 to reboot at 5pm. Every so often there will be a message that appears system wide that says System will go down in X minutes.
Is there a way to force this message to appear or verify that a shutdown -r 17:00 & is running in the background without cancelling the current shutdown?
You can verify jobs that are running in the background by using the command:
jobs
Like this:
root@server1:/var/www/nodebb# jobs
[1]+ Running shutdown -r 17:00 &
Here is a good resource on learning how to use jobs, and manage background jobs in general: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-command-line-run-in-background/
Keep in mind that the job is tied to your session, if you close it ( AKA close the shell ) your job wont run. A better option for me would be to use cron to schedule the reboot.
Edit your crontab:
crontab -e
Now enter the cron entry... this will reboot the box every day at 5pm. (17:00)
* 17 * * * shutdown
Thats it for cron! You can view your crontab via:
crontab -l
ps aux | grep shutdown is similar to jobs; however, this doesn't push out the global shut down message.
ps command just shows processes, so it's not an alternative. Try this: ps aux | grep shutdown | grep -v grep and I bet that comes back with nothing. Essentially when you grep, that is also a process, so you're probably just getting your grep process returned and not the shutdown process. The -v grep says omit the grep process.
Commented
May 29, 2014 at 20:59
apt-cache search jobs and see what packages come back, maybe there is something that you can install that is the jobs command itself or similar. Or just use Cron.
Commented
May 29, 2014 at 21:00