2w ago

Inhibit sleep when running stuff in the terminal. Thoughts?

discuss.kde.org

Inhibit Sleep when running certain kinds of tasks

A person, on the Gnome Issue, suggested that terminals inhibit sleep when there is stuff running in them.

Continuing from that discussion, I am trying to understand, at which point it would be desirable to implement said inhibition - terminal emulator, the shell or the program itself

Additionally:

We want to inhibit when running stuff like pacman, wget, cp or mv
We don't want to inhibit when running stuff like htop, less, watch

8 comments

We want to inhibit when running stuff like pacman, wget, cp or mv
There is already a separate systemd-inhibit command that does exactly what you need. Trust your users, they are capable of googling it (most of the time).
Only pacman and wget will benefit from suspend inhibition, because it will prevent breaking network connections. cp and mv will resume working just fine even when you hibernated your laptop while cp was executing. And in that case it's less bug-prone to scan your system for active TCP connections to external addresses instead of adding a hack wakelock inside your terminal or inside wget.
It is also a poor idea to mess up with system-wide settings from some command when the user does not expect it, you'll likely to get a thousand invalid bug reports that sleep mode is broken when some service randomly decides to use wget to continuously read from local Unix socket.
- There is already a separate systemd-inhibit command that does exactly what you need. Trust your users, they are capable of googling it (most of the time).
  Thanks for this. I now have an idea that would work at least for my case.
  So, in case the user runs some long-running command and doesn't remember to use systemd-inhibit, but then decides they should have done so (which seems like something that would happen to me a lot), there can be an option in the console to inhibit until the end of said process.
  Still, automates nothing though, so maybe that's just upto aliases and stuff.
  to scan your system for active TCP connections
  I was thinking in similar lines. Just need to decide what cases are worth keeping on for.
  e.g.
  You may not want to inhibit sleep just for an idle ssh in a terminal.
  You may want to inhibit in case you are encoding a video using ffmpeg. (in case of GUI programs, they are pretty full of stuff and I would expect them to inhibit when encoding)

It can't be the terminal that decides what inhibits and what doesn't. It must be the user or programs themselves.
How would implementing it in the terminal rather than shell look like? As a user choice? I don't see how that's reasonably possible.
Reading the other comments it seems like there's already inhibit commands.
If the shell does not provide a command or alias, or they can't because the inhibit API is system dependent, it's on the user to define. The user could define a fg alias or command, fg for foreground, which executes the command with inhibition.

I use gnome-session-inhibit quite a bit, but it's hard to imagine a good way to automate it.
Sometimes I inhibit idle to keep something on screen, and sometimes I just inhibit suspend so something can complete.
It probably doesn't make sense for the terminal to have anything more than a protocol to control it. The only real benefit to that would be in remote sessions, and it's not really clear how it should work when multiple machines are involved.

MacOS has had caffeinate forever, and it works great

I remember writing a script that posted an X event 1x a minute for something like that. The event was probably simulating pressing the shift key.
- I stIll use tHis methOd, it worKs flawleSsly!
- It shouldn't be required on systems that support the corresponding FDO spec, but I guess, that would be done when that was not implemented.

8 comments