How to trim the result of speedtest-cli to only output the download speed?
I'd like to periodically display my speedtest download speed result in indicator-sysmonitor.
speedtest-cli has a somewhat trimmed output if you run
$ speedtest-cli --simple
Ping: 50.808 ms
Download: 10.87 Mbit/s
Upload: 4.47 Mbit/s
Is there any way to trim the output even more, down to just the download speed numeral?
That's a job for awk
:
speedtest-cli --simple | awk 'NR==2{print$2}' # just the numeral
speedtest-cli --simple | awk 'NR==2{print$2" "$3}' # numeral and unit
Explanations
-
NR==2
– take line2
-
{print$2}
– print the second column (space-separated by default) -
{print$2" "$3}
– print the second column followed by a space and the third one
With sed
it's a little more complicated:
speedtest-cli --simple | sed '/D/!d;s/.* \(.*\) .*/\1/' # just the numeral
speedtest-cli --simple | sed '/D/!d;s/[^ ]* \(.*\)/\1/' # numeral and unit
Explanations
-
/D/!d
– search for lines containingD
and don't (!
)d
elete them, but every other line -
s/A/B/
–s
ubstituteA
withB
-
.*
– take everything -
[^ ]*
– take everything that's not (^
) a space -
␣
(space character) – a literal space -
\(…\)
- take everything inside and save it as a group -
\1
– get the content of group 1
As speedtest-cli
is a python program and library it's fairly easy to make a minimal alternative program that only performs a download test and prints the output.
Open an editor, save as dl-speedtest.py
import speedtest
s = speedtest.Speedtest()
s.get_config()
s.get_best_server()
speed_bps = s.download()
speed_mbps = round(speed_bps / 1000 / 1000, 1)
print(speed_mbps)
run with python dl-speedtest.py
This gives the result in bps, as a floating point number Mbps rounded to one decimal as requested
The minimal version of speedtest-cli for this to work is 1.0.0 I think, you may need to use pip install speedtest-cli --upgrade
to upgrade.
This will also work:
speedtest-cli --simple | grep -E "Download:\s*" | sed -r 's/Download:\s*//'
You can try this:
speedtest-cli --simple | grep "Download: " | sed "s/Download: //g"
And then there's:
speedtest-cli --simple | grep Download | awk '{print $2}'
Like dessert's first option though without the line selector.