When I hit restart, after a second or two, everything closes and the machine restarts. But sometimes, within that second I realize that I really didn't want restart just then. How can I stop the machine from restarting at that time?
The best way I can figure out is to cancel a save request if something needs saving, but that isn't always the case.
if you're really quick you could open a terminal window and type
sudo killall shutdown
that might work. Otherwise, quickly open an application that always asks if you really want to quit. You could use applescript to make such an application:
on quit
display dialog "Really shut down?" buttons {"No", "Yes"} default button "no"
if the button returned of the result is "Yes" then
continue quit
end if
-- If I don't continue the quit, the app will keep running.
end quit
type that into the applescript editor and save it as an application, then put it somewhere handy.
NB. Both of these methods may not work. I'm too lazy to find out if they do, because it might involve having to reboot several times.
Quickly go click an icon in the dock to launch an app that wasn't running.
That's what I do if I can't use the unsaved documents trick.
I always keep a random string unsaved in TextEditor, then before rebooting I'll be asked if I wanna save the document, and it gives me time to think if I really want a reboot. By hitting Cancel on the dialog, the reboot will be cancelled.
It's a dirty trick, but works well for me.
Unfortunately I don't know of any shortcut-based command that stops the restarting, but there are some... Unusual ways to cancel the restart.
As you said, having an open unsaved document allows you to halt the restart.
Having a web browser with browsers open (Firefox is the best option) which would warn you and prompts if you want to save the tabs for the next browsing session has the same effect.
I'm assuming that 98% of linux commands are also on a mac, but on Linux you can create a shortcut that points to sudo shutdown -c works.
