For years I have installed Cygwin on basically all my machines. But with the introduction of WSL and especially WSL2 I stopped using it.
One of the Cygwin tools I used often on our servers at the office was the shutdown command.
Yes, Windows has a pretty decent shutdown.exe but the major advantage of the Cygwin shutdown is that it mimics the Linux shutdown command, especially the possibility to add a timestamp at the end.
And another minor disadvantage of shutdown.exe is that when you use the wrong command line options you could shutdown the machine instead of rebooting it.
shutdown -fri 23:30This will forcefully reboot the machine and install the pending updates at 23:30.
The program will calculate the number of seconds between the moment of invocation and the requested time and pass that to the InitiateShutdown() Win32 API.
Every month I miss this functionality. When you need to install the regular Windows updates on a number of servers, you want to reboot them at a moment it has the least impact for the users. And you don't want to calculate that number of seconds. And I don't want to have to go through the hassle of setting up a one-time Scheduled Task. A command line tool is much easier.
I have maintained the sources of Cygwin shutdown for some time, so I took that as an inspiration for this tool. And since some of the code has been reused, I will obviously release this with the GPL2 license as well.
This command line tool reboots you machine at a given time.
The tool takes just one argument, a timestamp when the computer needs to reboot.
The word now (case insensitive) means just that, reboot immediately.
# Reboot immediately
RebootAt nowA timestamp means to reboot at the first time this time will occur. The timestamp has to be in 24-hours notation.
# Reboot today at 23:30
RebootAt 23:30
# Reboot tomorrow at 2:00
RebootAt 2:00+ means the number following is in minutes.
# Reboot in 60 minutes
RebootAt +60