Forcing a shutdown in OSX

So I've written a great little script that makes a set of symlinks that point to specific folders depending upon the day. This runs off a cron tab on an OSX server at 10 past midnight every night. The folder containing these symlinks is shared over NFS to a bunch of other macs. The problem I have is that although the symlinks update, you can see that in a terminal window, the little alias folders in Finder don't. It seems only a disconnect and reconnect to the share or a restart updates the alias folders.

So my question, is there any way to force a shutdown of a machine regards of anything running on it? The lusers are too stupid to remember to shut them down each night.

Make this Applescript script:

Code:

---

ignoring application responses
     tell application "Finder"
          shutdown
     end tell
end ignoring

---

And then run it from cron using the "open" command.

shutdown needed to be changed to shut down. But the apps still sit there asking for confirmation to quit.

Hmm. That's what the "ignoring" is supposed to avoid, obviously.

I assume you've tried the shutdown or reboot command.

How about "System Events" instead of "Finder"?

Terminal command "shutdown -h now" to shutdown or "shutdown -r now" for a restart. No GUI confirmations so unsaved work will be lost. But to OS X, it is a proper shutdown, just like any other Unix OS.

Quote:
Terminal command "shutdown -h now" to shutdown or "shutdown -r now" for a restart. No GUI confirmations so unsaved work will be lost. But to OS X, it is a proper shutdown, just like any other Unix OS.

That did it, stuck it in root's crontab and prefixed it with /sbin/

Now all the machines power off at 5 to midnight every night