On another list we were discussing features like the ability to close the netbook and have it continue to run. Someone found an interesting script and I commented on that: On Wed, 18 Nov 2009, Russell Horn wrote: > Looks like this is scriptable to the extent that you can even turn off > the LCD but keep the machine running if you're playing music. > > http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=38393 Wow. That is worth studying a bit. There are lots of neat little tricks worked into that script. I do a lot of scripting but I wouldn't have known how to detect all the different states of the machine (plugged in, etc.), so this part is awesome: LID_STATE=`cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state | awk '{print $2 }'` AC0_STATE=`cat /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC0/state | awk '{print $2 }'` VGA_STATE=`xrandr --prop -display :0.0 | grep "VGA connected [0-9]" | wc -l` LVDS_STATE=`xrandr --prop -display :0.0 | grep "LVDS connected [0-9]" | wc -l` I guess the guy doesn't know that the backtick is being deprecated in sh/bash, so we are supposed to do it like this using "$()": LID_STATE=$(cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state | awk '{print $2 }') That dollar-sign trick is pretty great because it works with nesting while the backtick cannot. His code is also an example of a bad use of "cat" because this works: LID_STATE=$(awk '{print $2}' /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state) So that's how I'll do it. It looks like there is a world of interesting data in /proc/acpi Different topic -- by the way, the other deprecation thing I have been trying to force myself to remember is to use "grep -E" instead of "egrep". Mike