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RebootAt

Introduction

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 23:30

This 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.

Usage

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 now

A 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