Ever since I started using DeVeDe I quite missed a feature of Nero DVD creation software - ‘Shutdown when complete’ as I usually keep for convertion from XVid/DivX to DVD during the night.

The process usually takes 4 hours, hence it would waste of electricity to keep the computer on for another 3 hours. So I searched for various options to shutdown the computer after predetermined time, the most popular one being use of cron.

But I did not want to set up ‘cron’, so I went on to find an alternative, which is when I found the ‘shutdown’ command itself.

On Ubunutu machine, all I had to do was issue the following command in terminal:

sudo /sbin/shutdown -h +300

Command Details

sudo : This is to execute the command as root, you will need the password here.

/sbin/shutdown : Command to shutdown the computer.

-h : This tell the shutdown command to power off i.e. halt.

+300 : The minutes before scheduled shutdown, here it is 300 minutes.

Make use of the command and let me know if you have some easier or more simpler alternative.