Scheduling a Mac to shut down or wake up is basically a no-brainer now that Apple has included a simple-to-use interface within the Energy Saver preference pane in OS X System Preferences.
Although Apple tries to make things easier for its users, it has neglected to provide the means to create a custom schedule, such as setting Mac on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday at 8:00 AM, and shut down every day at 11:00 PM.
However, there are ways to get around this problem using the pmset command line program. This small tool allows you to easily manipulate your Mac's power management settings, allowing you to quickly create a simple wake-up and shutdown schedule.
Most importantly, with the help of pmset you can set your Mac to turn on or off any day of the week, not just weekdays, weekends, or every day of the week, but also using a more complex system such as a combination of weekdays and weekends.
The only thing you need to do before creating a new timer app for your Mac is to open a terminal window by pressing ⌘ + SPACE, open Spotlight, type “Terminal” and press ENTER.
Next, you will need to run the following command as root (to do this you will need to have root access on your Mac) to program your Mac
sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MWFU 07:30:00 shutdown MWRSU 22:00:00In the example above, we told the Mac to turn on at 7:30 AM on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, and to turn off on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday at 10:00 PM.
If you want to use a different set of days to suit your schedule, you can create a custom series of days, using the corresponding symbol from the following abbreviated list for each day:
| Day | Code |
| Monday | M |
| Tuesday | T |
| Wednesday | W |
| Thursday | R |
| Friday | F |
| Saturday | S |
| Sunday | U |
