Today, we’ll have a look at some commands that will report your system’s vital statistics. First and foremost, we’ll see how long has your computer been on. Here’s a sample from my system:
| ninad@ml-228:~$ uptime | |
| 18:06:43 up 5 days, 6:24, 1 user, load average: 0.47, 0.39, 0.28 |
Another tool to find out the time when the system was last booted is:
| ninad@ml-228:~$ who -b | |
| system boot 2008-08-15 11:45 |
The command who shows a list of people already logged in to your Linux/Unix system and what terminal are they logged in from.
| ninad@ml-228:~$ who | |
| ninad :0 2008-08-15 11:45 |
One very useful utility, which is infact a command line system monitor, is top. Use ‘?’ to see the keyboard shortcuts, and ‘q’ to quit. To know your RAM’s usage, you can also use the following command, instead of opening top to search for that.
| ninad@ml-228:~$ free -m | |
| total used free shared buffers cached | |
| Mem: 1391 1359 31 0 56 765 -/+ buffers/cache: 538 853 | |
| Swap: 1019 459 559 |
The -m switch shows all the usage values in Megabytes, instead of the default Kilobytes. To check your hard disk for free space:
| ninad@ml-228:~$ df -h | |
| Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on | |
| /dev/sda6 15G 9.9G 4.1G 71% / | |
| varrun 696M 136K 696M 1% /var/run | |
| varlock 696M 0 696M 0% /var/lock | |
| procbususb 696M 52K 696M 1% /proc/bus/usb | |
| udev 696M 52K 696M 1% /dev | |
| devshm 696M 0 696M 0% /dev/shm | |
| lrm 696M 38M 659M 6% /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile | |
| /dev/sda5 61G 49G 9.5G 84% /home | |
| /dev/sda1 20G 20G 0 100% /media/sda1 | |
| /dev/sda2 15G 14G 1.9G 88% /media/sda2 |
I already have given you a shell script to check your computer’s temperature, as reported by the mother board’s sensor in this post. Hope I get answers from ACAD readers for the challenge of the previous post. Catch the answer in tomorrow’s post of ACAD! :smile: