Adjust brightness from Terminal

Sep 14, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: mat79

I've searched for a way to control the display brightness from the command line. I found several AppleScripts that open the System Preferences panel and set the slider, but I wanted a pure command line tool. Maybe someone else is looking for the same solution, so here is what I found:

This blog post discusses has a small commandline tool (written by Nicholas Riley) to set the brightness from Terminal. Just download the binary [4KB] and install it. You can then set the brightness by typing brightness 0 (to set it to minimum, use 1 for maximum, or any value between).

Note: The binary is Intel-Only (32-Bit), but the source code is available on the above linked page too, so you could easily compile a PowerPC or 64Bit Intel Binary on your own. I've tested it only with Snow Leopard and a self-compiled 64Bit binary, and it works fine

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