After being annoyed for the last year that my MacBook Pro was eating up my battery life while in hibernation, I finally chose to investigate the matter further. Several articles describe the pmset command (here is one), but to make a long story short I wrote a script that will let my Mac enter hibernation mode (suspend to disk) immediately, without altering the settings (permanently at least).
I uploaded it to pastebin to increase the chances of it being spread. Link.
It should be pretty self explanatory, but to sum it up it does the following:
- Back up your existing hibernation settings
- Sets new ones that will suspend to disk and then cut power (not keeping any power to RAM)
- Hibernates (and shuts off)
- On power on, it restores the previous settings
If you find it useful, drop me a comment. Maybe I could make this into a small systray utility some day if someone finds it useful.
Oligofren 
[…] wrote a script that will let you enter hibernation immediately (without changing your settings permanently). I […]
[…] wrote a script that will let you enter hibernation immediately (without changing your settings permanently). I […]
This is an excellent utility. You may want to leave instructions for the laypeople as to how to make this app run (I had no issues, all good). Thanks!