Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

I'm using Fedora and I want to be able to set my system up to shut down at a specific time ad hoc. I've been trying to do this using the cron but I can't get the init or shutdown routine to work. Can somebody confirm what the problem is ( I presume this task can be done remotely ).

Thanks.

Are you claiming can't run "shutdown -h now" in a cron job? You would have to be 'root'.

Yep, I haven't done hell of a lot of cron stuff so not very familiar with it, wondering if it's just a syntax problem in the cron or somert but I'm not getting any messages so I can't tell what's wrong

First you want a shell script which wraps up the shutdown...

First

mkdir /root

put the following in /root/shutdown.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh
echo trying to shutdown at `date`>>/root/shutdown.log
shutdown -h now >>/root/shutdown.log

then chmod +x /root/shutdown.sh

get the current crontab

crontab -l >crontab

edit crontab and add

when-to-do-it-according-to-crontab /root/shutdown.sh

finally

crontab crontab

then check with

crontab -l

Have set everything up.
Get "trying to shutdown at....." in the log file but not a lot else other than that...

Eureka, I've sussed it, needed the full directory path for the shutdown comand.

Thanks for the help Porter.