How to find out what woke your Mac

The log that already has the answer

macOS records every transition in and out of sleep, with a timestamp and a cause. Nothing needs to be installed or enabled first:

pmset -g log | grep -E "Wake from|DarkWake"

Real lines from a real machine, trimmed for width:

16:27:28  DarkWake from Deep Idle : due to smc.sysState.Wake wifibt
16:37:34  Wake from Deep Idle     : due to smc.sysState.Wake lid
17:55:38  DarkWake to FullWake    : due to UserActivity Assertion
20:53:08  Wake from Hibernate     : due to trackpadkeyboard/UserActivity

Each line answers the question directly: when, from how deep a sleep, and why.

Reading the reasons

The token after due to is the cause. The common ones:

Two of these deserve a closer look, because they are the ones that wake machines nobody is touching.

rtc is a scheduled wake. Something asked the machine to wake at that exact time. The pending ones are listed, with names attached:

$ pmset -g sched
Scheduled power events:
 [0]  wake at 08/28/2026 21:22:55 by 'goguma'
 [1]  wake at 08/29/2026 00:00:00 by 'com.apple...donotdisturb...timer'

The owner string tells you who to go and ask. Anything from pmset schedule shows here, including wakes armed for scheduled jobs, alongside Apple's own timers.

wifibt with Wake for network access. If the womp setting is on (it is by default on AC — "Wake for network access" in System Settings), the machine comes up briefly to answer network traffic. These are almost always dark wakes.

Wake versus DarkWake — the distinction that explains most mysteries

A line that starts Wake is the real thing: the machine came up fully. A line that starts DarkWake is housekeeping — the system runs briefly with the display off, then goes back to sleep. macOS punctuates a long sleep with these, and they typically last a few seconds each.

If you are investigating "my Mac wakes up at night", sort the lines first: a string of DarkWakes is a machine behaving normally, not a problem to fix. A full Wake at 03:12 with rtc as the reason is a scheduled wake, and pmset -g sched will tell you whose. What dark wakes are for, and why your jobs do not run during them, is its own subject — covered here.

Turning the question around

The same log answers the opposite question, which is usually the one that matters more: not "what woke it" but "what did it sleep through". Every interval between a Sleep line and the next Wake line is time your scheduled jobs did not exist for — and cron does not tell you what it missed. Replaying each job's schedule against these intervals is how you find the runs that silently never happened; it is also the first thing goguma does when installed, using exactly this log.

Common questions

Why does my Mac wake up at night by itself?

Usually one of three things — a scheduled wake something armed (visible in pmset -g sched), Wake for network access responding to traffic (the womp setting), or a maintenance dark wake, which is normal, brief, and does not turn on the screen.

What is a DarkWake in the pmset log?

A wake in which the system comes up to do background housekeeping without turning on the display. macOS punctuates a long sleep with these; they typically last seconds. A line reading "DarkWake to FullWake" means a dark wake was promoted to a real one, usually because you touched the machine.

How do I see scheduled wakes on my Mac?

pmset -g sched lists every pending scheduled power event with the time it will fire and the name of what scheduled it.

How far back does the pmset log go?

Days, typically — it is capped by size rather than by time, so a busy machine keeps less history than a quiet one.