Re: Detecting idle time on Mac

[Fletch]

Google is your friend.

ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | perl -lane 'if(/Idle/) {print $F[-1]/1000000000
+; last;}'

Update: cleaned up that link's Perl version a bit.

[sgifford]

Thanks Fletch, looks like that will work! For some reason I didn't think to search for OS X; I had been searching for Mac keyboard idle time and similar, which strangely turned up nothing.

Does anybody happen to know of a way to get this information without forking a copy of ioreg?

Thanks!

[Fletch]

There should be some way to access it through C and/or ObjectiveC, but exactly how is a different question. The Apple Developer Site has a pretty good set of documentation; you'll probably want to start looking here for stuff on I/O Kit and the HID related frameworks.

Unless this is something that's going to poll constantly I'd just cheat and run ioreg; it only takes six hundredths of a second to run according to my shell's timeing.