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Is it possible to shutdown + update the Mac ? It's annoying to wait for it to restart when I just want to click update and go home.

I've seen this once on a MacBook and I can't find how to do it.

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This may not be a good idea; some updates require 2 reboots to finish -- it reboots into a minimal OS, installs files that weren't safe to replace on a fully-operational system, then reboots again. What you really want it to do is to reboot, finish the update, then shut down; I don't think there's a way to do that. – Gordon Davisson Sep 21 '10 at 21:11
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4 Answers

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I think that if you download all updates and then shutdown your mac instead of restarting (ignoring popup), it will install updates and shutdown.

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I do this all the time... in particular, if you do the update, but when it asks to reboot, you say "not now" and kill the update process, when you shut down the computer it will ask if you want to install. Click yes, and walk away. – Brian Postow Sep 21 '10 at 17:17
+1, this works fine for me too – trolle3000 Sep 23 '10 at 11:54
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up vote 1 down vote

If you're just concerned about power consumption, the login screen can go to sleep. Check your energy settings in System Preferences

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If you use the GUI software update, you may need to stick around and select "Yes" for certain dialog boxes. If you really want to minimize your time and effort involved in applying updates and then shutting down the computer, try this:

sudo -s; softwareupdate -i -a; shutdown -h now
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streetpc does NOT want to reboot. – lajuette Sep 21 '10 at 16:05
I'm not sure about the behaviour of sudo softwareupdate -i -a but if you want to shutdown instead of rebooting try sudo shutdown NOW. – dtlussier Sep 21 '10 at 16:30
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If the installation takes more than 5 minutes, your sudo validation will expire and the second sudo will hang waiting for you to retype your password. Better to use sudo -s and then softwareupdate -i -a; shutdown -h now – Gordon Davisson Sep 22 '10 at 3:12
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up vote 1 down vote

This method seems to be more successful for me:

$ sudo sh -c "softwareupdate -i -a; shutdown -h now"

The above sudo -s technique simply opened a new root shell for me (OS X Lion) which, upon exiting, ran the following two commands as a non-root user.

I guess an alternative would be to switch to root first, then run the two commands (separated by semi colon)

$ sudo su -
$ softwareupdate -i -a; shutdown -h now
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