Enabling and Disabling Screen Savers from Command Line

Introduction

For my job, we got nice 42-inch LCD screens for monitoring. However, these are Toshiba models that don't even include a timer for turning the displays on and off. Instead of manually turning them on and off every morning, I preferred to use screen saver activation and deactivation features to manage them automatically.

Usage

Here's a test that should turn off your screen, wait, and then turn it back on:

1

xset dpms force off; sleep 5; xset dpms force on; xrandr -s 1; xrandr -s 0

To automate this process, you'll want to create a crontab entry. You'll need to add the following to your crontab:

1
2
3

DISPLAY=:0.0
0 20 * * 1-5 xset dpms force off
0 8 * * 1-5 xset dpms force on

This will turn off the displays at 8:00 PM and turn them back on at 8:00 AM, Monday through Friday.