How to display network traffic in the terminal?

Solution 1:

Here are some nice tools in the Ubuntu repositories for command line network traffic monitoring:

bmon - shows multiple interfaces at once

slurm - has nice colored graphs

tcptrack - A favorite. Tells how much bandwidth is being used and also what protocol (service/port) and destination the transmission is taking place to. Very helpful when you want to know exactly what is using up your bandwidth

Solution 2:

It's quite easy! install "iftop" with:

sudo apt-get install iftop

Then run

sudo iftop

from any terminal!

Enjoy!

Solution 3:

Someone should also have mentioned nethogs.

sudo apt-get -y install nethogs
sudo nethogs

The thing that's different and maybe is cooler about this one is that it shows traffic per process, like the image shows

Take a look at the page

Solution 4:

There is a nice tool called speedometer that displays a graph in the terminal using Unicode block characters, colors, and even adds labels to each peak in the graph.

$ sudo apt-get install speedometer
$ speedometer -l  -r wlan0 -t wlan0 -m $(( 1024 * 1024 * 3 / 2 ))

It has several options, can monitor multiple interfaces, can show multiple graphs in several rows or columns, and can even monitor the download speed of a single file (by watching the file size on disk).