How can I invoke poweroff from a script/process?

Posted November 5, 2021
DigitalOcean Droplets Linux Commands

I’d like for my droplet image to do the following:

Boot Ubuntu 20
Start a process (using services.d or whatever)
When the process finishes, invoke poweroff
For the droplet to truly power off

I haven’t been able to make this work. The poweroff command works from the CLI, if I am logged in as a user, even if the user is not a sudoer.

But if noone is logged onto the CLI, and the task finishes without a user being logged into the shell, the poweroff command appears to have no effect.

How do I power off a droplet programmatically from a bash script?

jorisw

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jorisw • November 6, 2021

The following at first seemed to enable poweroff from userland:

sudo chmod a+s /usr/sbin/poweroff

… However I was not able to reliably make this work without a logged in shell user present.

What I’m doing now, instead, is:

# User script:
./my-script ; touch /tmp/.poweroff;

# Root crontab:
* * * * * stat /tmp/.poweroff && /usr/sbin/poweroff;

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