Dim or Brighten Display via Terminal in OS X

Question

Premise: All OS functionality is code
Conclusion: I must have a way to emulate said code.

I would like to figure out how to have the exact same brightening/dimming display mechanism currently mapped to F1/F2 on my keyboard but via Terminal. I've googled and found a number of references to pmset, which is fascinating, but not the same goal.

Any thoughts on bash/c++ or other cli-based tools I can use to dim or brighten my display in OSx 10.6.7?

Answer 1

Based on the brightness program from @Nano8Blazex's comment, that is assumed to be installed on your $PATH:

Add the following lines to .bash_profile (assuming bash shell) and you can then use dim and lighten as commands for F1 and F2, respectively. Both work only on display 0 as listed by brightness -l.

function modify_brightness {
    local delta=$1
    current=$( brightness -l | grep "display 0: brightness" | cut -d" " -f4 )
    #echo "Current brightness is $current"
    new=$( echo "$current+($delta)" | bc )
    #echo "New brightness is $new"
    COMMAND="brightness -d 0 $new"
    #echo "Executing $COMMAND"
    $COMMAND
}

function dim {
    modify_brightness -0.0625
}

function brighten {
    modify_brightness 0.0625
}