How to cancel shutdown on Linux?

Question

I'm familiar with and use shutdown in Linux, and typically just do

> shutdown -h now

But is there a way to stop shutdown from happening, say if I aim to shutdown 10 minutes from now and then in 5 minutes' time I discover I really don't want to shut down?

chaos · Answer 1 · 2009-07-20T11:37:08.420

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shutdown -c is "cancel shutdown" on reasonably recent shutdowns.

The syntax also supports shutdown -c <message> for announcement purposes, so that's handy if other people use the machine.

edited Jul 20 '09 at 11:37

answered Feb 08 '09 at 20:45

chaos

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Which distro is that for? http://man.cx/shutdown doesn't mention a -c flag. – David Feb 08 '09 at 20:49
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But this does: http://linux.die.net/man/8/shutdown – David Z Feb 08 '09 at 20:51
Exists on vaguely recent Debian, dunno what else. – chaos Feb 08 '09 at 21:05
Works on current versions of Redhat distros. – dagorym Feb 13 '09 at 14:18
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I was just looking this up in Ubuntu last night; it's in the man page for their version... well, the system shutdown just as I read that, though! – JAL Apr 12 '09 at 03:31

score 45 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 28 '09 at 17:21

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You can use ps to find the shutdown process and abort it, for example with ps|grep shutdown.

Alternate and less eyeball-intensive versions of this:

pkill shutdown
killall shutdown
kill `cat /var/run/shutdown.pid`

edited Apr 28 '09 at 17:21

chaos

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answered Feb 08 '09 at 20:43

skiphoppy

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so `pkill shutdown` would work? – David Feb 08 '09 at 20:45
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Yeah. Seems suboptimal if (and only if) your shutdown supports -c, though. – chaos Feb 08 '09 at 21:19
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Alternatively: "killall shutdown" – Adam Rosenfield Apr 12 '09 at 03:11
Hmm... I thought shutdown only ran long enough to change the run level... He's probably asking how to get init to STOP shutting down. – dicroce May 06 '09 at 23:24
@dicroce: If you start a shutdown scheduled for some future time, like he talks about in the question, shutdown runs (hangs out, really) until it's time to actually shut down. The question is how to stop it during that time. – chaos May 17 '09 at 22:01
On OS X this cancels shutdown but then you need to delete /etc/nologin because it causes that only root can log in. – skywalker Dec 28 '15 at 11:23

Joshua · Answer 3 · 2019-06-27T14:41:09.640

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If you're a second late on the draw for shutdown -c, and already root on the console, a very fast # init 5 will cancel a shutdown after init changes runlevel.

NOTE: This answer is mostly obsolete now. init 5 isn't very useful on systemd, which, sadly, most systems now use.

edited Jun 27 '19 at 14:41

answered Apr 14 '09 at 22:28

Joshua

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score 8 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 19 '09 at 01:23

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From shutdown's man page on BSD systems:

A scheduled shutdown can be canceled by killing the shutdown process (a SIGTERM should suffice).

edited Jul 19 '09 at 01:23

chaos

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answered Feb 08 '09 at 20:45

Chris Bunch

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How to cancel shutdown on Linux?

4 Answers4