Best way to unpublish a node, given the nid, while bypassing any node update hooks?
If you have an array of nids you could just run this piece of code

example will unpublish the nodes with nid 1,2,3:

$nids = array(1, 2 ,3);

foreach($nids as $nid) {
    db_query("UPDATE {node} SET `status` = '0' WHERE `nid` =:nid ;"
,array(':nid'=&gt; $nid));
}

entity_get_controller('node')-&gt;resetCache($nids);