Can I view system stats in the Terminal?

The widget iStat Pro allows to monitor different system stats like

• CPU usage
• network bandwidth in/out
• memory usage
• ...

How can I view such system stats in the Terminal?

Solution 1:

Depending on what you want displayed there are several options available using Terminal:

• top: real-time sorted display of running processes such as memory and CPU usage
• iostat: I/O summary statistics for terminal, device and CPU operations
• vm_stat: Mach virtual memory statistics
• diskutil list: disk/volume capacity
• df: used/free space on mounted partitions
• fs_usage: real-time file activity for both disk and network
• nettop: updated information about the network (a bit like top for net I/O)
• w: who is logged in and what they are doing; plus a brief system load summary
• ifconfig and ipconfig: network interface and IP protocol details

Most of these commands have a huge list of options.  It's probably best to consult the man pages for details.

I usually rely on:

• top -u -s 10 to identify CPU-hogging processes;
• fs_usage -f filesys or fs_usage -f network to identify processes generating a lot of disk/network load.

Solution 2:

The iStats ruby gem lets you see the CPU temperature via the command-line.

Installation

$ gem install iStats

Usage

$ istats