mac geekery

The Mac has two different ways of doing a shutdown or restart: the Mac way and the Unix way. That is to say that one can go to the Apple Menu and pick restart or shut down and the system will gently close out all the programs and nicely tell everything it’s about to restart and then go on with itself.

The other way is to issue reboot or halt from the command line and then the system does it the Unix way: kill everything rather quickly and then reboot.

This is not to say reboot or halt are harsh, they do everything needed to stop the system properly. What they do not do is give graphical applications a notice and a chance to cancel shutdown if they want to.

Sometimes that’s useful, but sometimes you’re in the odd situation of wanting a clean restart or shutdown but are in the system via SSH and don’t have the GUI up. Never fear, it’s quite possible. Just issue the following command as the same user that’s logged in to the computer:

osascript -e ‘tell application “System Events” to restart’

You can use the command “shut down” if you want to power off the machine cleanly.