CAFFEINATE(1)

✨ CAFFEINATE(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual page for caffeinate 💖 this one is short, sweet, and absolutely iconic — it's basically a little babysitter for your desktop's nap schedule 😴🚫

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🌸 NAME 🌸

caffeinate — inhibit desktop idleness while a command runs

like... it keeps your computer awake while something else is doing its thing. no naps allowed, periodt 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

caffeinate COMMAND [ARGUMENT...]

you give it a COMMAND, you give it some ARGUMENT...s, and it does the rest. that's it, that's the whole vibe 🦋

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🫶 DESCRIPTION 🫶

So here's the tea, bestie ☕ caffeinate runs whatever command you hand it, and while that command is running, it stops your desktop from going idle. Which means — no cap — it stops the screensaver, the screen lock, and automatic suspend from activating. Even if you're literally not touching the machine at all. the machine just sits there, wide awake, thriving ✨

ngl, most of the time it's way more convenient to just use the fully-automatic caffeine(1) — she's the main character, she handles it all by herself 💁‍♀️ but caffeinate is your girl when it's impractical or just straight-up impossible to run a program in full-screen mode, or when you need to stop automatic suspend from kicking in during a long-running unattended command, like a system update 🖥️🔥 (imagine your update getting interrupted mid-way... couldn't be us 💀)

⚠️ Important heads-up for the cron girlies: when you're using caffeinate with cron(1) or any other task scheduler, you gotta make sure the DISPLAY environment variable is correctly set for the task. For lots of setups, DISPLAY=:0 (or whatever your current value of DISPLAY happens to be) will work; and for cron specifically, you just prepend this setting to the command. easy 🍓

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• caffeine(1)
• caffeine-indicator(1)

go check 'em out, they're part of the same lil friend group 🌈

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💜 AUTHORS 💜

Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> — thank you for this gift, king 👑

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okay so that's the whole page 🥰 this one came from the General Commands Manual, it's dated January 2015, and honestly? a timeless bop. now go keep your screen awake and slay 💅✨🦋