MacOS – How to get shutdown codes using terminal in macOS

I am searching for a solution to the same problem. I have not found a nice solution although there is a hacky one here which in short is:

Disable saving application state:

rm -r '~/Library/Saved Application State/*'
chmod -R a-w '~/Library/Saved Application State'

Disable 'Reopen windows when logging back in':

defaults write com.apple.loginwindow TALLogoutSavesState -bool false
chmod a-w ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
sudo chown root ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist

See the provided link for more details.

But I really hope there is some better solution to this ? In my case the problem is that I have a mac in a server room that automatically runs a script in a terminal window. This machine can be rebooted remotely. But thus every time it reboots it keeps the old terminal window and opens a new one, so if I have rebooted it 10 times there will be 10 terminal windows open where only one is in use.

The command you are after is shutdown. This informs all users that the machine is going to be shutdown and tells all apps to close files etc.

The command takes a parameter -h, -r or -s to shut down, restart or sleep the Mac.

The command has to be run as root so you need to use sudo.

e.g. to reboot the machine immediately

sudo shutdown -r now

e.g. to shutdown the machine in 60 minutes

sudo shutdown -h +60

From comments there are two things to be addressed

How shutdown works is by sending a sigterm to all processes which should then deal with that e.g. save open files etc. If they don't exit then they will get sent a SIGKILL which forces them to die with no chance to respond. The signals are not sent via the normal key message queue so Apps have to deal with this separately to the code that gets called from quit on the menu. A good app should call common code from both.

This other answer shows how to shutdown as if you hit the menu options. But note that apps can cancel this shutdown