Geeklet for Average CPU Load

Last week I divulged one of my more complex GeekTool/NerdTool scripts. This week, one of the simplest: a processor load indicator.

This one doesn’t even need to call a script, it’s a one-liner you can run directly as the command for a shell Geeklet. Just drag a new shell item from GeekTool/NerdTool to your desktop and use this as the command:

uptime|awk '{print $(NF-2)}'|grep -v average

Update: The command above was a little longer than it needed to be. As noted by Michael in the comments, you can substitute uptime for w|head -1 and get the same result with less work.

That will feed the one-minute load average from the w command1 to your desktop, where you can set the font and color as desired. Easy peasy. In the next Geeklet post, I’ll share a script for finding out what the top CPU-consuming processes are and displaying a color-coded list on the desktop.

  1. I can’t remember why I added the grep command to the end of it, but the -v would remove any lines that had the word “average” in them. You can probably leave that off unless you run into strange output. ↩