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How can I read the status of the battery on my MacBookPro from my own application?

Googling has so far only revealed APIs for device drivers to handle power events - there's nothing about user-land processes accessing this information.

thanks.

Alnitak
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5 Answers5

78

If you're looking for a quick way to query it from the command line, you'll find the pmset command helpful. To query the battery status, specifically, use:

$ pmset -g batt
Gary Chambers
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    And this is particularly useful when using your Mac remotely via SSH. It's good to know if you need to sprint over to it to connect to the AC! – ScrollerBlaster Sep 28 '12 at 18:55
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    curious that this got so many upvotes, when it's explicitly an API call I was looking for (per the answer I accept) – Alnitak Feb 19 '16 at 13:55
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    Plausibly because the question title/tags doesn't distinguish between scripts/CLI and compiled contexts, so many (like myself) find a trivially wrappable answer more useful than an answer that requires me to drop into a specific compiled lang. – xander Jul 17 '16 at 01:06
27

You'll want to use IOKit for this, specifically the IOPowerSources functions. You can use IOPSCopyPowerSourcesInfo() to get a blob, and IOPSCopyPowerSourcesList() to then extract a CFArray out of that, listing the power sources. Then use IOPSGetPowerSourceDescription() to pull out a dictionary (see IOPSKeys.h for the contents of the dictionary).

alfwatt
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Ben Gottlieb
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0

Maybe help extracted text into script app

pmset -g batt | head -n 1 | cut -c19- | rev | cut -c 2- | rev

output

Battery Power
AC Power
Bruno
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-2

For Objective-C, this works to get the current percentage:

NSPipe *pipe = [NSPipe pipe];
NSFileHandle *file = pipe.fileHandleForReading;
NSTask *task = [[NSTask alloc] init];
task.launchPath = @"/usr/bin/pmset -g batt |  perl -ne ' print \"$1\n\" if /([0-9]+%)/'";
NSPipe *pipe = [NSPipe pipe];
task.standardOutput = pipe;
[task launch];
NSData *data = [pipe availableData];
hd1
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-3

Look at the System Management Controller. I don't have my MBP handy, but I believe you need to look at smc.h

Terry Wilcox
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