How do I find the last logged system boot and shutdown times?

Question

I'm a Rails developer working on a web application on Ubuntu Server 10.04. Due to internal requirements, I was asked to find the last 10 system boot and shutdown times... I have no clue where to find these details. Could someone help me out?

Answer 1

Use the last command.

last -x | grep shutdown
last -x | grep reboot

You can pipe this to the tail to read the last n instances. For example, in your case:

last -x | grep shutdown | tail -n 10