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

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.

Answer 2

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)