How can I determine the current CPU utilization from the shell?

Question

How can I determine the current CPU utilization from the shell in Linux?

For example, I get the load average like so:

cat /proc/loadavg

Outputs:

0.18 0.48 0.46 4/234 30719

Answer 1

Try this command:

$ top

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Answer 2

You need to sample the load average for several seconds and calculate the CPU utilization from that. If unsure what to you, get the sources of "top" and read it.

Answer 3

Maybe something like this

ps -eo pid,pcpu,comm

And if you like to parse and maybe only look at some processes.

#!/bin/sh
ps -eo pid,pcpu,comm | awk '{if ($2 > 4) print }' >> ~/ps_eo_test.txt

Answer 4

Linux does not have any system variables that give the current CPU utilization. Instead, you have to read /proc/stat several times: each column in the cpu(n) lines gives the total CPU time, and you have to take subsequent readings of it to get percentages. See this document to find out what the various columns mean.

Answer 5

You can use top or ps commands to check the CPU usage.

using top : This will show you the cpu stats

top -b -n 1 |grep ^Cpu

using ps: This will show you the % cpu usage for each process.

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less

Also, you can write a small script in bash or perl to read /proc/stat and calculate the CPU usage.

Answer 6

Try this command:

cat /proc/stat

This will be something like this:

cpu  55366 271 17283 75381807 22953 13468 94542 0
cpu0 3374 0 2187 9462432 1393 2 665 0
cpu1 2074 12 1314 9459589 841 2 43 0
cpu2 1664 0 1109 9447191 666 1 571 0
cpu3 864 0 716 9429250 387 2 118 0
cpu4 27667 110 5553 9358851 13900 2598 21784 0
cpu5 16625 146 2861 9388654 4556 4026 24979 0
cpu6 1790 0 1836 9436782 480 3307 19623 0
cpu7 1306 0 1702 9399053 726 3529 26756 0
intr 4421041070 559 10 0 4 5 0 0 0 26 0 0 0 111 0 129692 0 0 0 0 0 95 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 369 91027 1580921706 1277926101 570026630 991666971 0 277768 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
ctxt 8097121
btime 1251365089
processes 63692
procs_running 2
procs_blocked 0

More details:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01690.html http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/procstat.htm