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Turn off monitor from Linux CLI

March 21, 2012 by Noah
I keep looking up this information and then losing track of it, so I'm posting it here for my own reference.

This command will turn off the monitor on a Linux box from the command line (sorta like what happens when you have your power saving options configured to do this automatically after a length of time):

xset dpms force off
The monitor turns off until you hit a keyboard button or move the mouse. With this info you could set up a keyboard shortcut to run this command and have something like a "lock screen button" on your netbook, to turn off the display on command and conserve battery life for a little bit longer than usual.

For a "lock screen button" that also locks the screen in addition to turning it off, a pair of commands like this may be handy:

xset dpms force off; xscreensaver-command --lock
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Comments

There are 17 comments on this page. Add yours.

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blueskull posted on July 27, 2012 @ 03:43 UTC

Thank you!

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mertin posted on March 26, 2013 @ 15:39 UTC

I always forget how to do this and your page is the first one that comes up in the google search. Thanks for the simple handy tip

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me posted on March 29, 2013 @ 03:01 UTC

thanks!!

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Coder@linux posted on May 28, 2013 @ 12:57 UTC

Hi I am trying to turn off 4 monitors at a time using the above command. It so happens that it turns off the 3 monitors except for 1 which displays RGB screensaver . Can you suggest a way out to turn off all the 4 monitors .

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easoncxz posted on July 30, 2013 @ 21:40 UTC

Simple works. Thanks for sharing!

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Anonymous posted on October 2, 2013 @ 15:18 UTC

thanks!

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A.Nony.Mouse posted on March 9, 2014 @ 19:35 UTC

Thanks, needed a way to do this from an "at" job in the middle of the night.

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Javier Acosta posted on October 28, 2014 @ 06:33 UTC

thank you very much!

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Pooping posted on January 29, 2015 @ 16:31 UTC

in the Shower tf2 get good get lmaobox poop.

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Bocskai Csaba posted on June 8, 2015 @ 11:11 UTC

Thanks a lot! I wonder if it's simple to create a button for this...

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Habib posted on June 10, 2015 @ 05:56 UTC

Thanks! This was a big help...

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Subin posted on August 25, 2015 @ 16:19 UTC

Thanks a ton !! Very Helpful. You could write a shell script as follows and run it from the Desktop like a batch file in windows

Create a new file with text editor

#!/bin/bash
xset dpms force off

Save file as .sh extension Chmod 755 to set permissions

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7Blink posted on August 18, 2016 @ 20:53 UTC

Thank you. I created a Desktop Icon with that command to put my monitor to sleep.

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tuxman posted on July 9, 2019 @ 03:53 UTC

Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for. Useful short guide.

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tuxman posted on July 9, 2019 @ 18:23 UTC

Forgot to mention for a more lightweight alternative there is i3lock. So for a black screen use xset dpms force off; i3lock -c 000000 -n

or with a background picture xset dpms force off; i3lock -i /path/to/picture/only.png -n

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01101001b posted on August 22, 2020 @ 02:39 UTC

This is EXACTLY what I needed! And it worked beautifully! Thank you so much! =)

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mule.ear posted on March 8, 2021 @ 15:58 UTC

I needed to be able to do this remotely, and just needed to add 'display :0' to the command. So now I can ssh in and run xset -display :0 dpms force off or just ssh targetMachine "xset -display :0 dpms force off"

Nine years after your original post and it's still helping people.

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