Setting anacron on Mac – Shell Scripting

Sorry, I only know command-line tools to do the job.

You can use pmset for that (like in pmset schedule wake "02/12/2012 12:42:00").

More explanations here and, of course, man pmset.

Setting Multiple "Power On" & Power Off" Events

Currently, it appears that pmset will NOT allow you to set more than one pair of "power on" & "power off" events when using a repeating schedule.

For example...

# pmset repeat shutdown MTWRFSU 02:00:00 wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 06:45:00

The above command would set a repeating schedule that would shutdown the Mac nightly at 2 AM in the morning and startup daily at 6:45 AM.

But, if you want to set multiple "power on" & "power off" events, you could specify a specific date/time and with a little scripting you could setup a schedule for a month.

# pmset schedule wakeorpoweron "06/07/2007 07:00:00"
# pmset schedule shutdown "06/07/2007 22:00:00"
# pmset schedule wakeorpoweron "06/07/2007 00:00:00"
# pmset schedule shutdown "06/07/2007 01:00:00"

You can print the StartCalendarInterval dictionaries with something like this: for h in {0..4}; do for m in {0,15,30,45}; do echo "<dict><key>Hour</key><integer>$h</integer><key>Minute</key><integer>$m</integer><key>Second</key><integer>0</integer></dict>"; done; done.

You could also run the script every 15 minutes but exit it depending on the time:

h=$(date +%-H)
m=$(date +%-M)
[[ $h -gt 4 || $h -eq 4 && $m -ne 0 ]] && exit

Or run EDITOR=nano crontab -e and add a line like */15 0-4 * * * ~/bin/script.