Remote Shutdown via Command Prompt

Remote Shutdown via Command Prompt

The shutdown command is most flexible when using it from the command prompt because you can add a bunch of switches to it, which allow you to customize the behavior. Go to Start, then Run, and type in CMD. You can see the list of switches by typing shutdown /? in the command window.

You have to use at least one switch in order for the command to do anything. Basically you would type in shutdown /x /y /z where x, y, z are letters in the list above.

Here are a couple of the most common command switches and the actions they perform:

/s: Shuts down the computer

/r: Restarts the computer

/m \\computername: The target remote computer to shut down

/f: Forces programs to close immediately

/t: Will wait a certain amount of time in seconds before shutting down or restarting

/a: Aborts a shutdown if you used a previous shutdown command with /t.

So for remotely shutting down another machine on your network, you would type into the command prompt the following commands:

shutdown /m \\computername /r /f

This command will restart the computer named computername and force all programs that are still running to close.

shutdown –m \\computername –s –f –c “The computer will restart, please save all work.” –t 60

This command will shutdown the computer named computername, force all programs that are running to close, show a message to the user and countdown 60 seconds before it shuts down

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