Schedule wake up/sleep or power on/off of your Mac

If you need your Mac to turn on or off, or to wake up or sleep at given times, every day, or every week or weekend day, you can schedule that process.

Computers are great for repetitive tasks, so, if you want to download that backup file from the server, every Friday at night, you can easily do it with your Mac.

To achieve the example above, the steps are:

• Turn the Mac on
• Run the cronjob (This will download the backup file by any means - say, using curl, from a given url - )
• Turn the Mac off

Of course in the example above, the best way to turn the Mac off, is using the shutdown in same script that downloads the backup file. That is out of the scope of this article.

Well, to schedule Mac to turn on and off at given days and hours, go to:

_System Preferences -> Energy Saver -> Schedule… _

You have to see something like this:

From there just configure according to your needs.

Note: If you are on a Macbook, or Macbook pro, the wake-up or power-on, will only work if the laptop is connected to the AC source.