How do you change the behavior of the power button in Lion?

On my Macbook Pro, whenever you press the power button it goes into sleep mode. How do I change this to do nothing?

Solution 1:

You can control whether pressing the power button should put your mac to sleep or present a dialog with options (sleep/restart/shut-down) using the pmset command. The following:

sudo pmset powerbutton 1

will put it to sleep right away (presumably your current setting) and changing 1 to 0 will present you with the dialog.

Pay attention to the fact that it's not a per-user setting, and changes the behaviour for all users. Something to keep in mind if you share the device with others. From the man page (explore it for other options):

All changes made through pmset are saved in a persistent preferences file (per-system, not per-user) at /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

Solution 2:

defaults write com.apple.loginwindow PowerButtonSleepsSystem -bool no

Is working for me on 10.9.5, and gives behavior very close to how the power button used to work for me on 10.6. Though there is a bit more of a delay, it's definitely not infuriating anymore.

http://www.defaults-write.com/10-9-stop-the-power-button-from-putting-your-mac-in-stand-by-mode/