Whether monitor is off without appealing to X or /proc

consolemonitors

How can I know whether the monitor is on or off if X is not running, and without appealing to /proc/acpi/video? The latter isn't available from my kernel.

If X is running it's just a matter of

  $ DISPLAY=:0 xset -q 2>/dev/null| grep "^\s*Monitor is"

But what if X is not running?

Best Answer

Looking through this Q&A on StackOverflow titled: How to Determine if LCD Monitor is Turned on From Linux Command Line I found this utility called ddccontrol that says it can report if a monitor is turned on or off. You can check out the documentation for using version 0.4.

You can basically run this command:

$ ddccontrol -p

If it returns any output, then the monitor is on, if it returns nothing the monitor is off.

References

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