noidle

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 22, 2012, at 11:32, Adam Dershowitz wrote:

> On Mar 22, 2012, at 1:00 AM, Drechsel Wolf wrote:
> 
>> frequently I noticed that my iMac G5 will go to sleep during a time extensive build (gcc45 at the moment).
>> 
>> I googled and found some other people with that problem - and an easy solution:
>> 
>>> #!/bin/bash
>>> pmset noidle &
>>> ... do the work here ...
>>> kill %pmset
>> Wouldnt it be smart to put the noidle command at the very beginning of any build script - and the kill %pmset at the very ending.
>> I'd like the iMac to do the building - and then go to sleep after it's finished.
> 
> 
> I don't agree that this is something that one would always want.  That is why the Energy Saver System Prefs allows users to set things how they want.  If you set it to noidle I believe that a laptop will run through batteries quickly and ignore the users setting in the prefs.  
> While I can understand why someone would want it that way, this should not be an across the board solution.  So, putting it in a script for yourself seems like a reasonable solution.  

The energy saver system preferences are for setting how long your computer waits to go to sleep when it is idle; building something with MacPorts is not being idle. I imagine the power manager probably largely just looks at whether there is mouse movement or keyboard input to determine whether the system is idle. Note that video players like VLC and Apple's DVD Player probably also manipulate the power manager so the system doesn't go to sleep in the middle of a video.