Restart Mac From Command Line

Restarting and shutting down a computer remotely is a frequent task for remote system administrators. As someone that writes many shell scripts, I also find myself automating system restarts. Let’s look at a few ways to restart Mac systems from command line!

Restart a Local Mac

To restart a local Mac system from command line, you can execute:

sudo shutdown -r now

Restart a Remote Mac

To restart a remote Mac system, you can execute:

ssh -l AdminSystemAddress
sudo shutdown -r now

Restart at a Specific Time

You can specify a restart at a specific time:

# Format:  sudo shutdown -r hhmm
# Restart at 11:30pm local time
sudo shutdown -r 2330

System restarts are good after massive updates or just for clearing out system resources. These command line examples should help restart a Mac locally or remotely.