Waking display from terminal, general waking

sleep-waketerminal

This is a two part question. A practical, "how to" question is first, and then I ask for configuration suggestions.

First, I put my displays to sleep at night, and I would like to be able to wake the display remotely. Is there a command line utility I can use to wake it via SSH? I know about WakeOnLan, but that seems like overkill.

Second, the whole reason for me wanting to wake my display remotely has to do with how Lion's power savings settings changed. The Apple infrared remote no longer wakes the display. This is a huge deal for a machine I originally bought to be a combined desktop/home theater pc, since it defeats half of its purpose. So, does anybody have any ideas/suggestions what to do about this? This is open ended, I know.

Best Answer

The easiest way to do this over SSH is to use caffeinate -u (available since OS X 10.9 I think) to simulate user activity.

Add the flag -t 5 to specify a timeout of 5 seconds (else you'd have to ctrl+c out of caffeinate, it seems).

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Terminal Sleep-Wake – Sleeping the Display from Terminal

In OS X 10.9, you can simply do pmset displaysleepnow. This will immediately turn off your display without changing any of your settings or putting the entire host to sleep.

Escalated privileges don't seem to be required (at least with recent versions of OS X), but if you get a message about inadequate privileges, you could do sudo pmset displaysleepnow.

Based on feedback from commenters, this is not available in OS X 10.8 or earlier.

MacOS – Mountain Lion sleep and caffeinate command

The assertions are removed when the caffeinate process exits.

caffeinate creates assertions to alter system sleep behavior. If no assertion flags are specified, caffeinate creates an assertion to prevent idle sleep. If a utility is specified, caffeinate creates the assertions on the utility's behalf, and those assertions will persist for the duration of the utility's execution. Otherwise, caffeinate creates the assertions directly, and those assertions will persist until caffeinate exits.

caffeinate (or caffeinate -i) prevents idle sleep until the process is terminated by for example pressing control-C or closing a shell window. caffeinate open -Wa uTorrent would also remove the assertion when open exits.

You can get a list of power assertions with pmset -g assertions. caffeinate or caffeinate -i should set PreventUserIdleSystemSleep to 1.

To always prevent sleep when uTorrent is open, you could add a line like this to a crontab:

* * * * * pgrep -x uTorrent && caffeinate -t 60

(Use EDITOR=nano crontab -e if you haven't changed $EDITOR and don't know how to use vi.)

Best Answer

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Terminal Sleep-Wake – Sleeping the Display from Terminal

MacOS – Mountain Lion sleep and caffeinate command

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