How do I shut down without the confirmation prompt?

• press Alt+F2 and type gconf-editor
• go to /apps/indicator-session and check items you want

11.04 and previous versions of ubuntu

• Alt + F2 and enter this: gconf-editor
• apps > indicator-session
• select suppress_logout_restart_shutdown

OR

• Alt + F2 and enter this:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/indicator-session/suppress_logout_restart_shutdown true

To re-enable confirmation, replace the keyword true with false

For 10.04

Use CtrlAltDel, wait 60s or Enter.

No mouse involved – but fastest way I know of.

For 11.10 and later

The above keys shortcut lead to the logout dialog only. To assign a keyboard shortcut to the power off dialog we open

gnome-control-center keyboard

or Keyboard from System Settings… to define a new Custom Shortcut for the command

gnome-session-quit --power-off

This will open the following shutdown window:

In case we want CtrlAltDel for this we may have to define another shortcut for System -> Log out first.

For GNOME2 panel (10.04 LTS)

Add Logout Button to GNOME Panel.

This is 1 mouse click to start the 60s shutdown countdown (immediate shutdown involves another mouse clicks).

Open Terminal and type sudo chmod u+s /sbin/shutdown

Then, from that point forward, any user can just issue the command shutdown in a terminal.

If you have Ubuntu Tweak installed you can do this by selecting Session control from the left hand side list and tick the box Suppress the logout, restart and shutdown confirmation dialogue box.

Check this question for Ubuntu tweak installation

• How do I install Ubuntu-Tweak?

Easy Pease.

Right click application menus.

Edit Menu.

GOTO – System Tools.

Click on “tick box” for the configuration editor.

Bingo.

Exit.

Applications, System Tools. configuration editor. // Apps – Indicator Session. Click the tick boxes to see exactly what they do and then untick them… and use this one.

/apps/indicator-session/suppress_logout_restart_shutdown

Suppress the dialog to confirm logout, restart and shutdown action. Whether or not to show confirmation dialogs for logout, restart and shutdown actions.

For Ubuntu 12.04 (Tested on 12.04, should also work on other versions)

Just open a terminal and run this command:

gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.session suppress-logout-restart-shutdown true

That’s it. To re-enable just change the true to false.

The good thing about this is, You don’t need to install dconf-tools, though it is better to install it, which will give you a graphical settings editor called dconf-editor to change many other features