How to get CPU utilization in % in terminal (mac)

Question

Ive seen the same question asked on linux and windows but not mac (terminal). Can anyone tell me how to get the current processor utilization in %, so an example output would be 40%. Thanks

Prejudicial

This works on a Mac ps -e -o %cpu | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}' – Vuong

thanks this is what i wanted, just got to add the % now! thanks – Prejudicial

@vcsjones, post this as an answer so OP could accept it – Dippy

Why not launch Activity Monitor? – Fasciate

Answer 1

This works on a Mac (includes the %):

ps -A -o %cpu | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s "%"}'

To break this down a bit:

ps is the process status tool. Most *nix like operating systems support it. There are a few flags we want to pass to it:

• -A means all processes, not just the ones running as you.
• -o lets us specify the output we want. In this case, it all we want to the cpu% column of ps's output.

This will get us a list of all of the processes cpu usage, like

0.0
1.3
27.0
0.0

We now need to add up this list to get a final number, so we pipe ps's output to awk. awk is a pretty powerful tool for parsing and operating on text. We just simply add up the numbers, then print out the result, and add a "%" on the end.

Vuong

That method isn't very accurate since these values are rounded. The real CPU usage might be much bigger or much smaller, which can be checked with the Activity Monitor. – Interlocution

I am using this command to get the % CPU usage on Mac, but I am getting certain percentage values which are greater than 100. Any idea why this could be? – Datolite

This is super helpful because it works in the recovery mode terminal. Thanks. @Datolite You may see >100% because you have more than 1 core. Or because of rounding issues. – Faubion

Also works over SSH, for checking on remote machines! @Questionnaire: chmac is right; you'll see the same thing if you sum up CPU utilization across processes in Activity Monitor; maximum utilization = (# cores * 100%). – Stand

This can't be a valid answer -- the measurement of CPU usage is very inaccurate compared to the approaches using top -l or what is reported from the macOS activity monitor. – Bedplate

Answer 2

Building on previous answers from @Jon R. and @Rounak D, the following line prints the sum of user and system values, with the added percent. I've have tested this value and I like that it roughly tracks well with the percentages shown in the macOS Activity Monitor.

top -l  2 | grep -E "^CPU" | tail -1 | awk '{ print $3 + $5"%" }'

You can then capture that value in a variable in script like this:

cpu_percent=$(top -l  2 | grep -E "^CPU" | tail -1 | awk '{ print $3 + $5"%" }')

PS: You might also be interested in the output of uptime, which shows system load.

Pianette

Answer 3

Adding up all those CPU % can give a number > 100% (probably multiple cores).

Here's a simpler method, although it comes with some problems:

top -l 2 | grep -E "^CPU"

This gives 2 samples, the first of which is nonsense (because it calculates CPU load between samples).

Also, you need to use RegEx like (\d+\.\d*)% or some string functions to extract values, and add "user" and "sys" values to get the total.

(From How to get CPU utilisation, RAM utilisation in MAC from commandline)

Lithography

Answer 4

Building upon @Jon R's answer, we can pick up the user CPU utilization through some simple pattern matching

top -l 1 | grep -E "^CPU" | grep -Eo '[^[:space:]]+%' | head -1

And if you want to get rid of the last % symbol as well,

top -l 1 | grep -E "^CPU" | grep -Eo '[^[:space:]]+%' | head -1 | sed s/\%/\/

Castellatus

Answer 5

You can do this.

printf "$(ps axo %cpu | awk '{ sum+=$1 } END { printf "%.1f\n", sum }' | tail -n 1),"

Bradney

Answer 6

top -F -R -o cpu

-F Do not calculate statistics on shared libraries, also known as frameworks.

-R Do not traverse and report the memory object map for each process.

-o cpu Order by CPU usage

Answer Source

Quadricycle

Answer 7

This only produces statistics, and skips extra work:

top -R -F -n 0

To find CPU utlliization, parse this as shown by Michael Behrens:

top -R -F -n 0 -l 2 -s 0 | grep -E "^CPU" | tail -1 | awk '{ print $3 + $5"%" }'

Extra -s 0 makes the second print follow with no delay (the default is 1 sec). Jon R has explained very well why one sample is not enough: it shows average CPU usage for an unspecified period of time.

Kesha