How do I schedule pmset wake for a cron job?

Should work, but give it a try with launchd instead of cron.

Waking my mac-mini as you have and running a script with launchd is working for me.

I use a GUI front-end, Lingon (https://www.peterborgapps.com/lingon/), to write my launchd

Camelot wrote:

> BTW What is the expected pmset wake duration once executed?

Indefinitely - at least until what other controls you have in place to put the system back to sleep.

In other words, there is no expectation that pmset wake will wake your machine for any specific period of time - it's no different from you hitting the keyboard to wake your machine - it will say away until what other power management settings you have (such as idle time) tell the system to go back to sleep.

If you want the system to go back to sleep when the job is done, add that to your script, or add another cron/launchd task to do it for you.

I'm waking a headless Mac-mini and I don't think I have any way to keep it awake other than ssh and running caffeinate. I've tried having launchd on the mini run caffeinate, but it doesn't seem to work. I would think that it should, but last I tried, it didn't work. I may look into this again.

> BTW What is the expected pmset wake duration once executed?

Indefinitely - at least until what other controls you have in place to put the system back to sleep.

In other words, there is no expectation that pmset wake will wake your machine for any specific period of time - it's no different from you hitting the keyboard to wake your machine - it will say away until what other power management settings you have (such as idle time) tell the system to go back to sleep.

If you want the system to go back to sleep when the job is done, add that to your script, or add another cron/launchd task to do it for you.

It sounds like you don't want it to sleep at all... in which case why not just disable all sleep controls?

Am I missing something?

While I can get my script to run before my Mac-mini goes back to sleep, I have not been able to keep it awake with caffeinate, or understand how macOS decides when to go back to sleep

You could try

caffeinate Users/robertseymour/MacBook_Local/scripts/twitterOauthwithImagePost/twitter.php

to see if that helps

I want the headless mini to stay awake for about 15 minutes.

pmset repeat wakeorpoweron 12:00:00 MTWRFSU

Wakes the headless mini, but will go to sleep sooner than needed.

Having launchd execute after wake:

caffeinate -t 900

doesn't prevent sleep for 15 min

Its a great GUI for launchd

His Smultron is a nice lightweight programming editor.