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Restarting and shutting down your Mac

apple logoThere are various ways to restart and shut down your mac. The obvious one is through the Apple menu (there's very little magic about that), but the one that is more useful is using a command line. Because MacOS is a derivative of Unix, it has many tools hidden from an average user. To restart the system using a command line, open a terminal and run the following:

sudo reboot

You will be prompted to enter your password (the same one you use to install apps). You can also shut it down by running this command:

sudo halt

Why is this useful? Sometimes the system hangs or you are at a distance and would like to restart your system. This command can run inside an SSH window, so there's no need to access the GUI itself. It can also be scripted and automated to run nightly, for example.

apple menu shut down system

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Last updated Mar 22, 2019