I'm getting more interested in using Terminal as an alternative way to address solutions on my Mac. I have seen this question entitled "Is there a better way to shutdown/restart OSX?".
I would therefore like to know:
How to shut down, restart and sleep my Mac using the Terminal command exclusively ?
The command you are after is shutdown. This informs all users that the machine is going to be shutdown and tells all apps to close files etc.
The command takes a parameter -h, -r or -s to shut down, restart or sleep the Mac.
The command has to be run as root so you need to use sudo.
e.g. to reboot the machine immediately
sudo shutdown -r now
e.g. to shutdown the machine in 60 minutes
sudo shutdown -h +60
From comments there are two things to be addressed
How shutdown works is by sending a sigterm to all processes which should then deal with that e.g. save open files etc. If they don't exit then they will get sent a SIGKILL which forces them to die with no chance to respond. The signals are not sent via the normal key message queue so Apps have to deal with this separately to the code that gets called from quit on the menu. A good app should call common code from both.
This other answer shows how to shutdown as if you hit the menu options. But note that apps can cancel this shutdown
/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend. I have it aliased in a file that is sourced in my .bash_profile as follows: alias lock='/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend'
Commented
Jan 13, 2016 at 22:31
Shut down without showing a confirmation dialog:
osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to shut down'
Shut down after showing a confirmation dialog:
osascript -e 'tell app "loginwindow" to «event aevtrsdn»'
Restart without showing a confirmation dialog:
osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to restart'
Restart after showing a confirmation dialog:
osascript -e 'tell app "loginwindow" to «event aevtrrst»'
Log out without showing a confirmation dialog:
osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to «event aevtrlgo»'
Log out after showing a confirmation dialog:
osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to log out'
Go to sleep (pmset):
pmset sleepnow
Go to sleep (AppleScript):
osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to sleep'
Put displays to sleep (10.9 and later):
pmset displaysleepnow
The four letter codes for the Apple events are listed in AERegistry.h.
All System Events commands above send Apple events to the loginwindow process. loginwindow is sent the same Apple events as above when you log out, restart, shut down, or put the the Mac to sleep normally. See Technical Q&A QA1134: Programmatically causing restart, shutdown and/or logout.
According to man shutdown, shutdown -h now and shutdown -r now send processes a TERM signal followed by a KILL signal.
According to the Daemons and Services Programming Guide, when you tell loginwindow to log out, processes that support sudden termination are sent a KILL signal, and processes that don't support sudden termination are terminated in different ways: Cocoa applications receive the applicationShouldTerminate: delegate method, foreground applications receive the kAEQuitApplication Apple event, background applications receive the kAEQuitApplication Apple event followed by a KILL signal, and daemons receive a TERM signal followed by a KILL signal after a few seconds.
sleep 60 && osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to shut down' might work but how to do it with applescript only?
Shutdown immediately:
sudo shutdown -h now
If you do feel like putting a delay on the shutdown, you can use the following command syntax instead:
sudo shutdown -h +30
(-h parameter set time to shut down, where (+)30 minutes to stop the system)
also useful, to logout from the terminal command line prompt, type 'exit':
[host:~user]$ exit
