Windows sysinternals

204 Part II Usage Guide
Option
Display options
Description
–m “message” For shutdown operations, displays a dialog box with the specified message to
an interactive user. If this option is not specified, a default notification message
will be displayed.
–c For shutdown operations, adds a Cancel button to the notification dialog box,
allowing an interactive user to cancel the operation.
–v seconds Displays the notification dialog box only for the specified number of seconds
before the shutdown. If this option is not set, the dialog box appears right
away when the shutdown is scheduled. If this option is set to 0, no dialog box
is displayed.
Other options
–t [seconds|hh:mm] Specifies when the shutdown operation should be performed, either in
seconds or as time-of-day in 24-hour format. The default is 20 seconds. (It
cannot be used with –l, –o, or –a.)
–f Forces running applications to terminate. (Note that Shutdown.exe on
Windows XP/Windows 2003 has a bug in which the logic for its –f option is
unintentionally reversed.)
–e [u|p]:xx:yy Specifies the shutdown reason code, with u for “unplanned” and p for
“planned.”
–n seconds Specifies the timeout in seconds to connect to remote computers.
PsShutdown does not use the InitiateSystemShutdown[Ex] and AbortSystemShutdown APIs
for remote shutdown or for cancellation by the interactive user. Instead, its service displays
a custom interactive dialog box. Therefore, PsShutdown and other utilities cannot be
intermixed to abort each other’s shutdown operations.
The notification and cancellation dialog box is displayed by the PsShutdown service, which
is remotely created and configured as an interactive service. Interactive services are a
deprecated feature of Windows, so this feature works as intended only in certain scenarios:
■ On Windows XP and Server 2003, the dialog box is displayed only to an interactive user
that is logged on to terminal services session 0, and only if NoInteractiveServices has
not been enabled. With Fast User Switching or Remote Desktop, users can be logged in
to other sessions. The session 0 user can be disconnected or even logged out.
■ On Windows Vista and newer, when the PsShutdown service displays the notification,
an interactively logged-on user is notified by the Interactive Services Detection
(UI0Detect) service. This service, if not disabled, allows the user to switch temporarily
to session 0 to interact with the dialog box. If the service has been disabled, interactive
users receive no notifications.
The reason you might want to use the –n option to control the remote connection timeout
is that if you try to use PsShutdown to control a computer that is already off, the command
might appear to hang for a minute before timing out. This delay, which is the standard
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