How to Restart, Reboot or Shutdown a Raspberry Pi 4

Let’s talk about how to properly shut down your Raspberry Pi 4, when it isn’t frozen.

Shutting down a Raspberry Pi 4

sudo shutdown -h

The added -h flag means to halt the system.

sudo shutdown -h now

The added “now” means to do it straight away. You could also add number, for example 10, to tell it to shut down in 10 minutes.

You can even give a specific time, 19:45 (in 24 hour format).

Notice that when you give the shutdown command it will send out a message to all logged in users: “The system is going down for system halt NOW!”

If you are actively working on your Raspberry Pi, within a few seconds you should get a message that the system has halted.

If you are logged in through SSH, your console window will simply close.

To reboot your Raspberry Pi 4, you can change the -h flag for an -r flag as shown below:

sudo shutdown -r

or simply

sudo reboot

This time the message displayed will be: “The system is going down for reboot NOW!”

So your Raspberry Pi 4 is frozen? This is when having SSH comes in handy.

Use an SSH client on another computer connected to the same network to connect to your frozen Raspberry Pi 4 and enter one of the following commands:

sudo shutdown -h now

sudo halt

sudo shutdown -r now

sudo reboot

I welcome your thoughts, questions or suggestions on my article on how to restart, reboot or shutdown a Raspberry Pi 4.

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