How do you change the behavior of the power button in Lion?

Question

On my Macbook Pro, whenever you press the power button it goes into sleep mode. How do I change this to do nothing?

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 01 '12 at 17:23

9

You can control whether pressing the power button should put your mac to sleep or present a dialog with options (sleep/restart/shut-down) using the pmset command. The following:

sudo pmset powerbutton 1

will put it to sleep right away (presumably your current setting) and changing 1 to 0 will present you with the dialog.

Pay attention to the fact that it's not a per-user setting, and changes the behaviour for all users. Something to keep in mind if you share the device with others. From the man page (explore it for other options):

All changes made through pmset are saved in a persistent preferences file (per-system, not per-user) at /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

answered Apr 01 '12 at 17:23

rm -rf

2,971

2

Seems this does not work for Mavericks. It gives "Usage: pmset " output. Any thoughts? – lulalala Oct 28 '13 at 06:33
2

I can confirm, pmset in Mavericks doesn't accept powerbutton arguments. – nine9ths Nov 12 '13 at 21:07
4

So irritating that someone clear used time to remove functionality that everybody is crying for now! – mabartibin Dec 12 '13 at 14:42

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 20 '14 at 01:27

3

defaults write com.apple.loginwindow PowerButtonSleepsSystem -bool no

Is working for me on 10.9.5, and gives behavior very close to how the power button used to work for me on 10.6. Though there is a bit more of a delay, it's definitely not infuriating anymore.

http://www.defaults-write.com/10-9-stop-the-power-button-from-putting-your-mac-in-stand-by-mode/

answered Oct 20 '14 at 01:27

kmantel

41

Not working for me in Sierra / macOS 10.12; nothing happens when I pressing the power button.
OTOH, I can hit Ctrl-PowerButton to get a dialog, whether this is set to yes, no or unset.
– WHO'sNoToOldRx4Covid-CENSORED Oct 03 '16 at 15:42

How do you change the behavior of the power button in Lion?

2 Answers2

Linked