How to use command prompt to shutdown and restart your computer

There are times you (as a system Administrator) may want to reboot your PC due to undesired behavior on your PC. During and after the installation of new programs (software and hardware), most times, you may need to restart your device. This will shut off all processes so that the Kernal can be re-established with the new software or hardware. Here are some useful switches (flags) that can be combined to shut down or restart a computer.

For more information on Windows command prompt and PowerShell, see the link. See the following guides on “how to prevent a remote shutdown and restart in Windows 10, how to allow only admin users (administrators) to shut down and reboot Windows Server 2012, how to prevent users from shutting down in a Virtual Machine and Handy Command-Prompt Shutdown Commands.

-r This will have the server shutdown and then restart
-f This will force the server to close any running application 
-t 01 This is a time-out before shutdown.

Combining these commands into a single syntax, we have the following command below

shutdown -r -f -t 00

When this command is run from the command prompt as shown below, the device will be restarted immediately because of the time specified.

As you can see, the device restart is being initiated as shown below.

– Click on the hyperlink for Windows Active Directory Short Keys – Windows Administrative Shortcut
– For Windows Short Keys – Windows Administrative Shortcut, see the following link

Here's how to do the shutdown functions via a the CLI (batch file):
shutdown -r — restarts
shutdown -s — shutsdown
shutdown -l — logoff
shutdown -t xx — where xx is number of seconds to wait till shutdown/restart/logoff
shutdown -i — gives you a dialog box to fill in what function you want to use
shutdown -a — aborts the previous shutdown command....very handy!
shutdown -h — hibernate. Easy mistake - it's not for help

Additional options:
-f — force the selected action

I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment session.