How can you safely shut down your Mac if your mouse stops working?
On most Macs, you can press and hold the power key to power down immediately. I’m assuming you want to do something more graceful.
If needed, press ⌘+tab to visit each open application, and use ⌘S to save your work.
If you are not signed into an administrator’s account, you will need to sign into such an account. To do that, type ^⌘Q (Control-Command-Q). That will put you on the lock screen. To get the list of accounts, press esc. Then use the up and down arrow keys to select an administrator’s account. Press return. Enter the administrator’s password. Now you are ready to proceed with the rest of the instructions.
Press ⌘+spacebar to open spotlight search.
Type
terminal
- Press return to open the terminal.
In the terminal window type:
sudo shutdown -h now
-
- Press return.
Enter your account password. Your Mac will shut down.
Can you think of an easier way?
This tip was created and tested on MacOS 10.6.5. It should work on any version of MacOS X since spotlight was introduced.
Thanks to Stefan SEJH Hinz for the spotlight tip!