How can I shutdown a number of machines without going to each machine?

John Savill

August 9, 1999

1 Min Read
ITPro Today logo in a gray background | ITPro Today

A. I have a number of machines setup in my Lab and at the end of an entertaining evening of computing I don't want to have to goto each machine and shut them down so I wrote a small batch file that uses the shutdown.exe resource kit utility. Just enter the following into a file with a .bat extension:

rem Batch file to shutdown local machine and the PDC, BDC
shutdown \pdc /t:2 /y /c this shuts down a machine called PDC in 2 seconds, repeat with other machine names
shutdown \bdc /t:2 /y /c this shuts down a machine called BDC in 2 seconds
shutdown /l /y /c /t:5 this line shuts down the local machine in 5 seconds

You can then just right click the file in explorer and drag onto the desktop, release and select "Create shortcut". Clicking this icon will then shutdown all the machines in the file. On a NT Server these shutdowns arenot graceful and the users will not be asked to save work if they are not loggedon or the machine is locked. If they are logged on then they have the option ofsaving files (unless a force switch is used).

If you have installed a SP4 or SP5 on Win NT, remote shutdown command willshutdown machine immediately without stopping services (dirty shutdown event ID6008)

About the Author

Sign up for the ITPro Today newsletter
Stay on top of the IT universe with commentary, news analysis, how-to's, and tips delivered to your inbox daily.

You May Also Like