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My keyboard has a special key that puts my machine to sleep. Once asleep I have to push the power button momentarily, but that button is difficult to reach. If there were a wake button I would assign say ctrl@kb_scsleep to call wake. however I do not find a wake function.

Does anyone have some hints for me?

This is not an idea and hence is the wrong place to ask this question.

As for your question, although I don't know the answer off the top of my head you may want to research the following to answer your question:

xmodmap for key remapping (note depending on some keyboard drivers this may or may not be possible to do what you are trying to do)
xev for finding out keycodes
powersave or pm-utils (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pm-utils) for suspend conrol
acpi daemon for sending suspend/wake signals