wake(8)

wake8

Send wake on lan frames to hosts on a local ethernet network

Usage

wake [interface] lladdr [lladdr ...]

Overview

The wake program is used to send Wake on LAN (WoL) frames over a local Ethernet network to one or more hosts using their link layer (hardware) addresses. WoL functionality is generally enabled in a machine's BIOS and can be used to power on machines from a remote system without having physical access to them.

interface is an Ethernet interface of the local machine and is used to send the Wake on LAN frames over it. If there is only one Ethernet device available that is up and running, then the interface argument can be omitted. lladdr is the link layer address of the remote machine. This can be specified as the actual hardware address (six hexadecimal numbers separated by colons) or as a hostname entry in /etc/ethers. wake accepts multiple lladdr addresses. Link layer addresses can be determined and set using ifconfig(8).

Files

/etc/ethers

Ethernet host name data base.

Releases

39 releases since FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE; the text changed 25 times.

  1. 8.0
  2. 8.1
  3. 8.2
  4. 8.3
  5. 8.4
  6. 9.0
  7. 9.1
  8. 9.2
  9. 9.3
  10. 10.0
  11. 10.1
  12. 10.2
  13. 10.3
  14. 10.4
  15. 11.0
  16. 11.1
  17. 11.2
  18. 11.3
  19. 11.4
  20. 12.0
  21. 12.1
  22. 12.2
  23. 12.3
  24. 12.4
  25. 13.0–13.2
  26. 13.3–16.0

Authors

wake was written by Marc Balmer ⟨[email protected]⟩.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.