Load average
You don't need sudo to read /proc/loadavg
In addition, sed is the wrong tool here, try using cut, for example:
$ cut -d' ' -f1 < /proc/loadavg
0.04
cut will cut lines by a delimiter (given with -d), in this case a space, and you can then use -f to select a field, in this case the first one.
Now, converting it to percentages is actually fairly meaningless, since you'll often end up above 100% (see comment below), I've seen load averages in excess of 50 (that would be 5000% percent?).
In all my years of UNIX/Linux experience, I can't recall ever seeing the load average being expressed as a percentage, and if I would encounter such a thing, I would find it very odd.
But if you really want to (you don't!), just multiply by 100 with dc, like so:
$ dc -e "`cut -d' ' -f1 < /proc/loadavg` 100 * p"
29.00
For the CPU Utilization, because it is supposed to be on a short time
interval, I can use the first value from /proc/loadavg.
The load average is not the same thing as CPU usage.
- A load average of 1 means there is one process waiting for something (usually the CPU or disk).
- A load average of 2 means there are two processes waiting.
- A load average of 0.5 (over the last minute), can mean that for 30 seconds, there was one process waiting, and for 30 seconds, there were no processes waiting. It can also mean that for 15 seconds there were two processes waiting, and for 45 seconds there were no processes waiting. The keyword here is average.
If you want to get the CPU utilization, then this is probably the most portable way:
$ top -bn2 | grep "Cpu(s)" | \
tail -n1 | \
sed "s/.*, *\([0-9.]*\)%* id.*/\1/" | \
awk '{print 100 - $1"%"}'
Note you need to use -n2 to get fairly accurate results.
I've adapted this from this answer, which also lists some other possibilities, some simpler, but most tools mentioned aren't installed by default on most systems.
Network
For the bandwidth monitors I haven't the slightest clue of what I
could use in /proc to get that sort of information so I'm open to all
suggestions.
You can use the output of ifconfig, for example, on my system:
ens33: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.178.28 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.178.255
inet6 2001:980:82cd:1:20c:29ff:fe9e:c84b prefixlen 128 scopeid 0x0<global>
inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:fe9e:c84b prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether 00:0c:29:9e:c8:4b txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 45891 bytes 36176865 (34.5 MiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 20802 bytes 2603821 (2.4 MiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
It's the RX packets & TX packets we want. Let's extract just those values:
$ ifconfig ens33 | grep -E '(R|T)X packets' | grep -Eo '\([0-9].*\)' | tr -d '()'
34.5 MiB
2.5 MiB
- First we
grep all the lines starting with RX or TX
- With those lines, we then
grep for a parenthesis \(, followed by a number [0-9], followed by any characters .*, followed by a closing parenthesis \). With the -o flag we show only the matching part, instead of the whole line.
- With
tr, we remove the unwanted parentheses.
This should be what you want. If you want to get a number of bytes, you can use a different grep pattern in the second grep. I'll leave it as an exercise to you what exactly that is.
