Recently I was running some tasks on my Macbook Pro I wanted to prevent the machine from sleeping. A quick DuckDuckGo search tipped me off to the caffeinate command that’s built into the Terminal in macOS. If this is a well-known thing in macOS, I’ve never come across it so I thought I’d share here in case anyone else would find it useful.
If you have some reason to prevent your machine running macOS from sleeping, caffeinate gives you a few options. For basic usage, here’s how you use it:
Step 1: Open Terminal
If you’re not sure how to do this, see here (it’s one of the Applications that comes with macOS).
Step 2: Type caffeinate and hit Enter
This will prevent your Mac from sleeping as long as you don’t close the lid or exit Terminal. Once you close Terminal, hit Ctrl+C, or close the lid on your machine, the process will exit and normal sleep behavior will resume.
Now, here’s the really handy part—caffeinate takes arguments, meaning that if you add an option after the command, you can change how long it will run or set it to wait for a specific process or command to complete before exiting.
caffeinate -iprevents sleeping indefinitely (prevents idle sleeping)caffeinate -u -t 3600prevents sleeping for 1 hour (the-uflag resets the last time the user was active, and-t 3600defines the time limit in seconds, equivalent to an hour)caffeinate -s <command>prevents sleeping until a command finishes running. Just replace<command>with your desired commandcaffeinate -w <pid>prevents sleeping until a running process completes, provided you define the PID of the process
Resources
For further reading, here’s the original article I found as well as the actual man page for the command.
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