When developing, there are times when you need to run tasks that take a long time on your local machine.

For instance, processing a large volume of data, training machine learning models, and so on.

Generally, you can simply go to battery options and check “Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off while using a power adapter.”

However, in situations where you cannot use the power adapter or want to put the computer to sleep, the running script might be interrupted.

To prevent this, you can use the caffeinate command.

The caffeinate command is provided by MacOS and prevents the system from entering sleep mode.

Instead of creating such a command, it seems this could just be provided as an option

Usage

The basic format of the caffeinate command is as follows:

caffeinate [options] [command]

The command specifies the command to be executed. If omitted, caffeinate command keeps the system from entering sleep mode.

If you want to run a python script, you can write the command as follows:

caffeinate python script.py

This way, the system will not enter sleep mode while script.py is running.

Options

The caffeinate command provides several options:

• -d: Prevents the display from sleeping while the command is running.
• -i: Prevents the system from going into idle sleep while the command is running.
• -m: Prevents the hard disk from going to sleep while the command is running.
• -s: Prevents the system from going to sleep when using a power adapter.
• -t <timeout>: Prevents the system from going to sleep for a specified time in seconds. When this time is up, caffeinate will terminate.
• -u: Tells the system that a user is active, similar to using a keyboard or mouse.
  • Generally used with the -t option. If -t is not specified, the timeout is set to a default of 5 seconds.
• -w <pid>: Prevents the system from going to sleep until the process with the specified process ID (PID) is complete.