How do you keep the machine awake?

Question

I have a piece of server-ish software written in Java to run on Windows and OS X. (It is not running on a server, but just a normal user's PC - something like a torrent client.) I would like the software to signal to the OS to keep the machine awake (prevent it from going into sleep mode) while it is active.

Of course I don't expect there to be a cross platform solution, but I would love to have some very minimal C programs/scripts that my app can spawn to inform the OS to stay awake.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I use this code to keep my workstation from locking. It's currently only set to move the mouse once every minute, you could easily adjust it though.

It's a hack, not an elegant solution.

import java.awt.*;
import java.util.*;
public class Hal{

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
        Robot hal = new Robot();
        Random random = new Random();
        while(true){
            hal.delay(1000 * 60);
            int x = random.nextInt() % 640;
            int y = random.nextInt() % 480;
            hal.mouseMove(x,y);
        }
    }
}