smartctl - Can't run select span range

[Rainer Müller]

On 2018-06-29 10:03, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On Jun 28, 2018, at 19:43, Ubence Quevedo wrote:
> 
>> I gave caffeinate a try, and set my system sleep time to a more reasonable timeout [30 minutes], but since smartctl isn't an interactive process [a tsr?], the system never stays awake long enough to finish a whole test.  I even added the -m option to prevent the disk from idle sleeping but that didn't help.
> 
> Oh, right. As I recall, smartctl exits immediately, and the test occurs on the disk in the background, and you later run smartctl again to get the result.
> 
> In that case, you can run smartctl normally, and then caffeinate a sleep command that takes at least as long as the test. For example, if the test will take 206 minutes, you could sleep for 207 minutes (12,420 seconds):
> 
> caffeinate -i sleep 12420
> 
> ("sleep" in this context means "wait this many seconds").

You can just start caffeinate without any arguments in a separate
terminal window to prevent the system from sleeping until you kill the
process (with Ctrl-C).

Rainer