fastest way to reboot your mac

If you need to teardown your current login session and get your mac up and running in a hurry, here’s a neat little trick that should take you from login to logout and back again in as little as 10 seconds. And I’m not talking about SSD-only Macbook*’s either. That’s the time I achieved on a clunky late-2014 iMac with a sluggish old mechanical 1TB Fusion drive.

Forget the Apple menu and the ‘Restart…’ menu option and don’t worry about how many login items or startup scripts you’ve got either, this method will slice through them all.

We’re going to leverage a little-known command in the launchctl command line tool that will teardown and rebuild your login sessions in an instant. To see for yourself, execute this in Terminal:

sudo launchctl reboot userspace

I was astonished at just how fast the reboot is. What’s even nicer is you don’t lose any unsaved data either. This command restores all current window sessions (similar to checking the ‘Reopen windows when logging back in…’ option in the normal Restart dialog) but without the delay of the standard restart procedure.

See the man launchctl page for more options on using its reboot command.

Enjoy. 🙂

featured picture: Steampunk boots by Imp0s5ible

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