I’m looking for a reliable way to log when my laptop is:

  • powered down
  • boots up
  • goes to sleep
  • wakes up

Currently I’m checking both the systemd-suspend and tlp systemctl services, but these don’t really feel very robust, and I don’t have TLP installed on all my machines.

Is there an easier way to do this, or a better systemctl unit that logs all the power states of my machine. Preferably laptop agnostic?

Laptop snippet so far:

journalctl --since -9days -u systemd-suspend -u tlp \
    | grep -P "Finish|Start|Stopped" | sed '/.*Finished TLP.*/d;
            s|Starting TLP.*|╭╴System Boot  |;
 s|Starting System Suspend.*|┤ · Sleep      |;
 s|Finished System Suspend.*|├ · Wake       |;
             s|Stopped TLP.*|╰╴Power Off    |;' \
    | sed -r 's|^(.*:[0-9]+)+:[0-9]+.*:(.*)|   \1 \2 |'
  • tetris11OP
    2·
    9 hours ago

    It can report just before it’s shutting down. Hell, if I run shutdown -P 20:00 "OH WE GOIN DOWN" you bet your ass that I will get a wall message on every tty with that message at 8pm.

    I’m just wondering how to reliably capture the shutdown messages without having to scan the entire system log. I just assumed that there would be one service file that I would have to check for these types of events, but apparently the best bet I have is the TLP service daemon which typically only runs on laptops.