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Correctly grep and display the uptime, load average and amount of users

Published: 06-09-2012 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article


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While doing my monitoring script ray-mon I found out it can be quite hard to get the correct values for uptime, load average and users on different systems.

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For example, the uptime command displays this on a mac:

 8:27  up 1 day, 17:06, 1 user, load averages: 1,01 0,87 0,79

This on a debian 6 machine:

 06:27:33 up 4 days,  2:36,  2 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.26, 0.27

This on a RHEL 5 machine:

 06:28:26 up 54 min,  127 users,  load average: 6.34, 6.28, 6.27    

Small differences in space placement, "load averages:" instead of "load average:" and "min" vs "days". It took me quite a while to find out how to get the correct values for the following items using just unix tools:

  • Uptime
  • Amount of users logged in
  • Current load average

Uptime

uptime | grep -ohe 'up .*' | sed 's/,//g' | awk '{ print $2" "$3 }'

First take the output of uptime to grep, only show matching characters (-oh) and do regex (-e). Filter on "up" "space" "everything after that". Then go to sed to remove the comma's "4 days," to "4 days", and then with awk print the second and third collumn, and remove the rest of the output.

Users logged in

uptime | grep -ohe '[0-9.*] user[s,]'

Take the output of uptime to grep, only show matching characters (-oh), and do regex (-e). Filter on "number between 0 and 9" "any amount of the previous character" "space" "user, or users"

Load

uptime | grep -ohe 'load average[s:][: ].*' | awk '{ print $3 }'

First take the output of uptime to grep. only show matching characters (-oh), and do regex (-e). Filter on "load average: or load averages:" "everything after that". The with awk print the 3d collumn.

Tags: awk , bash , grep , load , snippets , uptime , users