A question of pmset

Hi,

Firstly, great forum and I hope you guys can help!

I have several suites of macs running at a college. I want to shutdown all the macs at night as the students tend to leave them running. So far I have used the following command in terminal;


So, at 9pm each weeknight the macs will shutdown, fine. The problem however is that they tend to leave software running which then halts the shutdown, is there any way to force the macs to kill all the running software through pmset or should I be doing this another way?

I'm happy for anything open to be lost as basically they should have saved it.

I wonder if cron might be a better solution here. I only suggest this since, with cron, you could use the shutdown tool to halt the machine which, at least in Linux (so I imagine it's the same in OS X), is ruthless and waits for nothing to close. Are you familiar with cron?

Why don't you schedule them to shut down at a certain time.
Preferences>Energy Saver >Schedule.

Haha, this might have been an instance of over thinking this on my part. That should work as well.

Cheers for your fast responses!

Docx, the problem with the energy saver is that it basically calls pmset so still will not shutdown if any software is running. The reason I used the terminal command is that it does not appear in the energy saver control panel so can't be altered by users!

Vansmith, I have not used cron at all but I’ll have a look at it, cheers.

Take a look at cron. I use it to run a few things on a schedule and it works really well. With cron, you can also (as noted) use the shutdown tool to halt the machine which won't care if something is running (which appears to be what you want to accomplish).

Here's a nice cron tutorial on the Ubuntu wiki.

You could also build a stay open Applescript application, that runs in the background, and checks the
current system time every few minutes, and then closes all running apps when 9pm roles around,

I'm no Applescript expert, but I could post some code if your interested in that kind of solution.

Regards Mark

The only problem with an AppleScript solution is the ease with which it can be stopped. Any student at a machine could stop/quit an AS, thus precluding the shutdown process from ever happening.

Good Point.

Yes that is a possible problem, but I would have the app well hidden in a location that only
a system admin could access, and have it set up to start automatically when the computer starts.

But point taken, just an alternative though.

Mark