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I have a weird problem where my laptop will wake when it's closed, generating a lot of heat and causing much frustration.

Is there a way that I can tell if the laptop's lid is closed so that I can automatically suspend the computer (via a cron script) if it wakes itself while the lid is closed?

Closing the lid does currently suspend the machine and opening it does wake it, so that works properly. It's a 2011 MacBook Pro running Ubuntu 12.04.

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  • I'm having a similar issue with a Dell laptop running Arch Linux. Commented Aug 3, 2014 at 22:30

2 Answers 2

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For my specific case, I can get the status of the lid with 

$ cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state state: open

I can then just grep for open or closed to see if it's open or closed.

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  • To note: this works on my MacBook Pro, a Dell laptop, and a Gateway laptop also, so I'm assuming this is fairly ubiquitous. Commented Aug 6, 2014 at 21:50
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    How about 2 in 1 notebooks that can have lid 360° opened? is there an indication or should we use some combination of lid open and accelerometer readings? Commented Apr 24, 2017 at 21:00
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    Answering to my own comment, I put hands on 2 in 1 (Dell) and it only reports "open/close". However, when computer goes tablet or tent mode there is a keystroke reported to disable keyboard, hence, a combination of accel, keystroke and lid "open/close" can tell if the computer is in tablet/tent mode. Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 12:37
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    This work on Linux too, however, with a slight modification: LID instead of LID0 → /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state. Commented Oct 6, 2022 at 12:39
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Not really an answer to your linux-specific question, so maybe this answer should be moved to the comments:

MacBooks of all generations are known to have some issues with their system management controller of which one of the symptoms is strange behavior on lid-close and lid-open. This support page from Apple might help you resolve the problem: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

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  • BSD-style systems usually have a sysctl value that indicates whether the lid is open or closed. sysctl | grep lid would yield the name of the sysctl you want. However, I don't know about the way Linux handles this. Commented Aug 3, 2014 at 23:19

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