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Shutdown/Reboot remote computer from command line

We can normally shutdown a computer using the shutdown icon in the start menu. For system administrators it’s a very common situation where they need to shutdown a computer that’s not at their desk. Reaching to a computer physically consumes one’s time. Remote desktop comes handy for those situations. User can login to a system using remote desktop and they can can reboot/shutdown the computer. But if you have lot of computers which need to be shutdown then doing it from a batch file would be very helpful. Such a command would save lot of time for system administrators. For this purpose there’s a tool called PsShutdown.exe developed by SysInternals.com (Now part of Microsoft). You can see below how to use this tool.

PSShutdown.exe can be downloaded as part of PS Tools from the below location.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897541.aspx

To shutdown a computer you can run the below command.

PsShutdown.exe -u username -p password \\Remotecomputer

You would see a message like below after running the above command.

Remote computer is scheduled to reboot in 00.00.20.

If you want to schedule the shutdown at a specific time you can use -t switch to specify the time in 24 hours format.  For example, to schedule remote computer shutdown at 3:30 pm today, the command would be:

PsShutdown.exe -t 15:30 -u username -p password \\Remotecomputer

What about the windows in-built Shutdown command ?

The in-built shutdown command does not take user name and password from command line and uses the current logged in user credentials. This would be a problem if the local user does not have privileges to reboot the system. I am also not sure if this command works reliably. I tested this once but got access denied error.

How to Restart a remote computer ?

You can use PsShutdown command even for restarting a remote computer. You can run the below command for this purpose.

PsShutdown.exe -r -u username -p password \\RemoteComputerName

Feel free to share your experiences with remotely shutting down a system. You can use the comments section below for this.

9 comments… add one
  • Anonymous

    Can we only start remote machine once we have shut down the machine using PSSHUTDOWN

  • Techblogger

    That is not possible with default Windows. When the machine is off, it can't receive any more commands. There seems to be some 3rd party tools available for such functionality. You can find them by googling for "power on windows computer remotely"

  • Anonymous

    using -s which says Shutdown without power off.can we start in some ways?

  • hamid

    i have win7 on my computer and downloaded ps tools but i cant use psshutdown commands what should i do
    and want to learn about gaining access with remore computers by cmd commands where can i exactly learn
    regards

  • Ramesh

    Please help me with this. If I have a list of servers, let’s say in a file, how do I issue a reboot for all of them at once?Please suggest me a simple way of doing this.

  • Alex

    Is it possible to issue a remote shutdown command to a machine and not have your user details show up in the message.
    For instance, on the user side where the reboot is about to occur, the person will see a dialogue box appear with a standard message saying “This system is shutting down…This shutdown was initiated by .”
    Question: Is it possible not to display the last part of the standard message:
    “This shutdown was initiated by .”

    I realize that this might sound like a “black hat” type of question – but I can assure you that there is a legitimate business case to warrant this type of requirement.

    Cheers!
    ~A

  • Pratap

    i executed that command
    psshutdown -u username -p password \\remotecomputer
    instead my own system is suffering
    my system is going off.

  • TheWitchKingofAngmar

    shutdown -i
    This command pulls up a window where you can add a list of ip addresses to be shutdown/restarted
    In addition you can set the time in seconds for shutdown.

  • Abdullah

    Great tool, it works well.
    which port psshutdown uses?

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