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I wrote a script for my dwm statusbar. One part of it is finding the current cpu usage for every single core on my system. I figured out a way myself but I would need some help fixing a bug in this. Here is the command: top -bn 2 -d 0.5 | grep -F '%Cpu' | tail -n 4 | awk '{print $3}'. This assumes that your top shows every core per default. You can achieve this by issuing top then pressing 1 and then pressing W to save the current configuration to a .toprc file in your home folder. Everytime you open top now it will display all of your cores. My aforementioned command has the drawback that when assigned to a variable like this:

CPU=$(top -bn 2 -d 0.5 | grep -F '%Cpu' | tail -n 4 | awk '{print $3}')

and then using $CPU with xsetroot like this: xsetroot -name "$CPU" I will get the output I want in my statusbar but between every cpu percentage there will be two symbols on top of each other separating them v and t. How do I get rid of them? Has this something to do that I might be using an array instead of a string here?

You can see the problem on the left side of the picture.

Command:

top -bn 2 -d 0.5 | grep -F '%Cpu' | tail -n 4 | awk '{print $3}'

sample output:

14.3
12.0
8.0
10.0

Note for anyone using this script: When the cpu usage for a core reaches 100% the array that the command outputs will move the column with the current load from column 3 to column 2. Hence, with awk '{print $3}' you will then see us, as output for column 3. If you're fine with that leave it. If not you could have awk print column 2 as well. It will just be :. A solution that avoids all those pitfalls is:

top -bn 2 | grep -F '%Cpu' | tail -n 4 | gawk '{print $2 $3}' | tr -s '\n\:\,[:alpha:]' ' '
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  • Fell free to edit the title if you have a better one. Commented Aug 31, 2014 at 13:10
  • Which OS do you use and post output of top -bn 2 -d 0.5.
    – Cyrus
    Commented Aug 31, 2014 at 13:15
  • Archlinux with kernel version 3.16.1-1-ARCH; x86-64. You really don't wanna see the ouput of top -bn 2 -d 0.5 that will be an aweful long list of running processes... Commented Aug 31, 2014 at 13:20
  • Off-topic: you may prefer to read /proc/stat to get the same information more cheaply. See proc(5).
    – aecolley
    Commented Aug 31, 2014 at 16:32
  • Thought about this too... Do you have a solution at hand how to do this? Commented Aug 31, 2014 at 16:39

1 Answer 1

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The "stuff" between the values seems a visual representation of the newline character to me ( octal character code 12), which you would get when using:

echo -e 'a\012b'

What you could try is pipe the output through tr '\n' ' ' as with:

echo -e 'a\012b' | tr '\n' ' '
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  • Cheers, you were close! It seems it's not a visual representation of the vertical tab bar but rather a newline. As I suspected the problem might be that I assign a 4x1 array to a bash variable and pass this to xsetroot. By removing the newline I get either a string or a 1x4 array. I'm not sure. So I need to pipe the output through tr '\n' ' '. Could you update your answer? Commented Aug 31, 2014 at 15:07
  • I believe the rogue character is a newline (i.e. linefeed), even though it is displayed as VT. Therefore the correct filter is tr '\012' ' '.
    – aecolley
    Commented Aug 31, 2014 at 16:21

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