When macOS goes to sleep, it starts a low-power ‘smart sleep’ mode which opens a network connection to see if there’s any updates. It’ll keep this behaviour up every few minutes until you wake the Mac. This is a sleepwatcher script to make it turn off Wi-Fi power (and thus disconnect you from the internet) and tell you exactly what it’s doing (the ‘verbose’ tag), then running it again to turn Wi-Fi back on. When using IRC, this prevents all the timeout/reconnects your Mac fills a channel with when it goes to sleep.

As an alternative, check to see if LaunchAgent has been added to the newest sleepwatcher brew formula. Instead, you could try brew services start sleepwatcher and then create/edit ~/.sleep and put networksetup -setairportpower Wi-Fi off in there (and chmod +x it) then perhaps create a ~/.wake if needed.

Network protocol analyzer developed by an international team of networking experts, formerly known as Ethereal.

Bruce Schneier: “…I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password. There’s no encryption.”

a linux based internet alarm clock and widget device

“…in real life the only people sniffing your wireless signal are jerks like me who need a place to log on until the phone company wires the apartment.”

“the two biggest obstacles which cannot be overcome by technology: time zones and poor communication skills”