***Apologies for those who know about screen and shutdown, this guide is targeted at LINUX newbies.

Sometimes I want the ability to have myth shutdown after a specified period of time. This can be accomplished via the shudown program; for example, the following will shot the machine down after 60 minutes:

What I like even better is the ability to run shutdown via an ssh window AND then log out and still have the program running in the background. To do this, you'll need a a program called screen that allows you do "detach" yourself from an ssh session while still keeping it active. Another great uses for screen is when you're doing something time consuming (like an FTP xfer for example) and again you don't want to have the ssh session active to the LINUX box the entire time.

I'm pretty sure screen isn't included with R5A30.2 so do this to get it:



Once that finishes simply use screen to multiplex a virtual terminal and run your command. In the following example I'll have the machine shutdown in 3 hours (180 minutes).



If for some reason you want to reattach yourself to that session simply type:


If you have several screens running and you try that, you'll see something like this:



As the instructions tell you, simply use the PID (5124 and 5129 in this case) like this:

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

what is wrong with

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

I didn't know about that one... I'll give it a shot, thanks for the post.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

nohup = no hangup = ignore the hangup signal the process gets when the shell exits

& = run in background i.e. after command starts, shell prompt is returned

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

What's the syntax to abort something you ran with nohup similar to the "screen -r" in my example?

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

You can abort the shutdown by logging back into the box and running "killall shutdown" as root.