Question

OS X Lion still goes to sleep, even if programmatic mouse “wiggles” are being periodically issued from a Java Robot (this is a standard approach to keeping machines from going to sleep and is documented elsewhere in stackoverflow, and it worked for me prior to OS X Lion).

Can anyone suggest an alternative approach, which does not require permission escalation, of keeping the machine awake from a Java application?

((The fallback solution is obviously to change the Energy Saving preferences so that the machine never sleeps, but we’d like to be smarter than that because requiring the machine to stay awake is the exception rather than the rule)).

Answer 1

It turns out that it is no longer possible to do this with pure-Java hacks, and one must resort to implementing a JNI I/O listener, the code of which would contain something like

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#qa/qa1340/_index.html

An alternative, if you can tolerate calling a command line tool, is to call pmset noidle in a daemon thread.