How to programmatically prevent a Mac from going to sleep?

Question

Is there way to prevent a Mac from going to sleep programmatically using Objective-C? The I/O kit fundamentals section on Apple\'s dev site tells me that a driver gets notif

Answer 1

Apple's Q&A1340 replaces Q&A1160. The latest Q&A answers the question "Q: How can my application get notified when the computer is going to sleep or waking from sleep? How do I prevent sleep?"

Listing 2 of Q&A1340:

#import 

// kIOPMAssertionTypeNoDisplaySleep prevents display sleep,
// kIOPMAssertionTypeNoIdleSleep prevents idle sleep

//reasonForActivity is a descriptive string used by the system whenever it needs 
//  to tell the user why the system is not sleeping. For example, 
//  "Mail Compacting Mailboxes" would be a useful string.

//  NOTE: IOPMAssertionCreateWithName limits the string to 128 characters. 
CFStringRef* reasonForActivity= CFSTR("Describe Activity Type");

IOPMAssertionID assertionID;
IOReturn success = IOPMAssertionCreateWithName(kIOPMAssertionTypeNoDisplaySleep, 
                                    kIOPMAssertionLevelOn, reasonForActivity, &assertionID); 
if (success == kIOReturnSuccess)
{

    //Add the work you need to do without 
    //  the system sleeping here.

    success = IOPMAssertionRelease(assertionID);
    //The system will be able to sleep again. 
}

Note that you can only stop idle time sleep, not sleep triggered by the user.

For applications supporting Mac OS X 10.6 and later, use the new IOPMAssertion family of functions. These functions allow other applications and utilities to see your application's desire not to sleep; this is critical to working seamlessly with third party power management software.