Today I ran across another really cool command line tool for tweaking Mac OS X machines. The command is pmset and it allows you to set power management preferences on a Mac OS X machine. This includes setting how long a machine waits until it sleeps to scheduling startups and shutdowns. For more information on how to use it, open the Terminal application and type:

man pmset

An example of pmset would look like this:

pmset repeat shutdown MTWRF 15:00:00

The above command would set a preference that would schedule an automatic shutdown of your Mac at 3:00 PM on Mon-Friday.

If you have Apple Remote Desktop as part of your arsenal of tools, then this is really handy. Using the “Send UNIX Command” with ARD, I could set a new startup or shutdown time, sleep interval, etc to hundreds of machines at once.

Cool, huh?

–Pete