Commands to turn off display in the Linux terminal

Sometimes I use laptops in the home lab, and to save myself on a few watts of power usage I use these terminal commands to turn off the display, then just SSH into it from my PC.

Reference: Several answers to this post on AskUbuntu

With VBETool

Source: https://askubuntu.com/a/62861

Install vbetool if missing:

sudo apt install vbetools

Turn off monitor in console:

sudo vbetool dpms off

To regain control of the console on pressing Enter key:

sudo sh -c 'vbetool dpms off; read ans; vbetool dpms on'

With XServer

Source: https://askubuntu.com/a/116806

To Turn Off:

xset -display :0.0 dpms force off

To Turn On:

xset -display :0.0 dpms force on

If your display turns off and then immediately back on then try the following which adds a delay of 1 second before turning the screen off. This give a chance for all events to be processed by the X server before turning the display off.

sleep 1 && xset -display :0.0 dpms force off

With setterm

Source: https://askubuntu.com/a/1076734 & https://askubuntu.com/a/1194293

The below command will make the screen go blank automatically every minute (if idle) and any key press will turn it back on:

setterm --blank 1

Append --powerdown 5 to power off the display after 5 minutes:

setterm --blank 1 --powerdown 5

And even better, if you want the command to be executed automatically at boot, you can add it to the GRUB command line, to do so we have to edit the next file:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Once there, just add consoleblank=60 to GRUB_CMDLINE_DEFAULT, it should look like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet consoleblank=60"

Then close the file and save it, after that just run sudo update-grub and voila, every time you boot the screen will turn off automatically every 60 sec. (again, if idle).

And this way (adding the consoleblank to the GRUB) works even from remote terminals via SSH.

Alternately you can create a bash script to execute at boot. Create the script file somewhere, for example:

nano /home/USER/.boot-scripts/screen-off.sh

Copy & paste the below into it:

#!/bin/bash
setterm --blank 1 --powerdown 5

Make the script executable by systemctl. Create file /etc/systemd/system/screen-off.service and insert:

[Unit]
Description=Blank screen after 1 min and turn it off after 5 min. Any keypress will turn it back on.
After=ssh.service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
Environment=TERM=linux
StandardOutput=tty
TTYPath=/dev/console
ExecStart=/home/USER/.boot-scripts/screen-off.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=local.target

Make it executable:

sudo chmod +x /home/USER/.boot-scripts/screen-off.sh
sudo chmod +x /etc/systemd/system/screen-off.service

And finally get it working and enabled on boot:

sudo systemctl start screen-off.service
sudo systemctl enable screen-off.service

To disable it:

sudo systemctl disable screen-off.service