How to Shutdown or Reboot Debian 10

This small tutorial shows two ways of shutting down or rebooting a Debian 10 server or desktop using the terminal.

Using shutdown command

Open the terminal and execute the following command to shut down the machine,

shutdown --poweroff

This will shut down the machine. If you want to cancel, you have to use the -c switch along with the shutdown command.

Similarly, when you have to reboot, execute the below command. If you want to cancel your action, use –reboot option.

shutdown --reboot

Using systemctl command

An alternative to the shutdown command is to use the systemd systemctl command.

Debian 10 power off using systemctl:

systemctl poweroff

Debian 10 reboot using systemctl:

systemctl reboot