Have you ever had a penury to shut down your Mac , but , for one reason or another , you could n’t actually do it ? You might be wondering how that could be — consider a office where you ’ve left your work machine on , so you’re able to utilise Remote Login ( in the Sharing System Preferences panel ) to login to it later from home . While get home , your recall that sustenance was going to exclude down business leader to the building this evening — and there ’s your Mac , sitting there with 15 open applications , innocently awaiting its imminent king unsuccessful person . You could , of track , turn around and tug back to the office . But take you ’ve go another motorcar at base , and have enabled remote login to your work auto , you could just persist in on habitation and shut down your work Mac from there .

If you ’ve plan ahead , you ’ve enable remote GUI control by using the Sharing System Preferences panel — see this Mobile Mac tower for more particular on how to set that up . take on you ’ve done all this , then you’re able to just connect to the remote Mac ’s GUI , and peck Shut Down from the Apple carte .

But what if you ’re not so proficient at planning , and you ’ve only bequeath the auto with Remote Login enabled ? Then you ’ll want to use the Unix command suitably namedshutdown . This command will exclude down the remote Mac , and it has a identification number of utile option .

Here ’s how it works . First , you must link to the remote Mac , typically viassh , which is enable using the Remote Login option of the Sharing System Preferences panel . This also imply that the remote Mac must be approachable through any firewalls that might live between the two machine . On the machine being used to close down the remote Mac , you ’d typewrite something likessh -l username 12.34.56.78 , replacingusernameand12.34.56.78with the proper user name and IP address for the distant machine .

Once you ’re connected , you need to execute theshutdowncommand as the root ( superuser ) substance abuser . But before we shut down the machine , rent ’s seem at some of the various forms ofshutdown .

Very crucial : Keep in psyche that , although this will give you a “ clean ” shut down ( the system will ensure that everything happens in an orderly manner ) , anything be given in the GUI will simply quit — even if you have clear documents with unsaved changes . rent me repeat that : unsaved changes in written document capable in the GUI will be lose ! .

There are other scenarios where this trick is utile , too . One that comes to mind is using it to safely shut down if your display break done for . Just remotely login from another Mac and use this control to exclude the motorcar down in a safe manner .