Replying to David, Lasse, Stroller, and others; Guys [and/or Gals], THANKS for the tips and assistance. With your help, I've got a working version; which I'll paste at the bottom of this message. Some of you had some questions which I'll try to answer: 'fmsadmin list clients' does return an empty string if no clients are connected Yes this is part of FileMaker Server 7 'fmsadmin' does not SEEM to return proper exit codes The following code may be copied/used: if in it's entirety; if proper attribution is given if partially/modified: freely Explanation: It sends a message to all connected clients that it's going to shut the server down, then waits for either; all clients to disconnect or 3 minutes, giving an additional warning at 2 minutes, and then CLOSES all databases. A companion script re-opens the databases after I've finished updating the databases via rsync from a remote location. #! /bin/sh declare -i Csec Dsec Warning Tstart; Warning=0; Tstart=$SECONDS; Csec= $SECONDS; Dsec=Csec-Tstart; fmsadmin -m"Im going to shutdown FileMaker Server 7; please quit FileMaker 7. " Send Result=`fmsadmin list clients` while [ "$Result" != "" ] && [ $Dsec -lt 180 ] do Result=`fmsadmin list clients` #echo's are for diagnostics echo "/"$Result"/" #Warning= if 2nd warning has been given sleep 10; #Tstart = Time started Csec= Current seconds Dsec= Difference in the two Csec=$SECONDS; Dsec=Csec-Tstart; echo "Csec="$Csec "Dsec="$Dsec "Tstart="$Tstart; if [ $Dsec -gt 120 ] && [ $Warning -ne 1 ]; then fmsadmin -m"Im going to shutdown FileMaker Server 7; please quit FileMaker 7. LAST WARNING!!" Send Warning=1 echo "re-sending warning" fi done fmsadmin -y Close exit