Get last five minutes load average using ksh with uptime

Question

To an idea of CPU load average, I'm using uptime in a ksh script:

uptime | awk '{print $11}' | sed '$s/.$//' | read CPU

where I then use the variable CPU later.

The $11 part is to isolate the last five minutes part. But, I noticed today that this was not working. Specifically, the last five minutes part was returned with $9. The function is returning less parameters. This is because the machine was recently rebooted, and so uptime shows minutes since reboot instead of days and minutes.

Is there a way I can consistently get only the last five minutes part of uptime?

In case it is not clear, this is a *newbie* question! – Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE Jul 31 '12 at 07:29 — Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE, Jul 31 '12 at 07:29

score 11 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 13 '16 at 22:42

11

cut -d ' ' -f2 /proc/loadavg

/proc/loadvg is the source of data for uptime, w, who and others. It has a simpler format and the numbers always have a dot before the decimal part (uptime and such use the current locale, so you may find something like

load average: 0,18, 0,26, 0,30

which are harder to parse

plus is faster by an incredibly low factor! ;-)

edited Dec 13 '16 at 22:42

answered May 22 '13 at 09:06

Riccardo Galli

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Are there any downsides to this approach? On the surface it does seem a much better solution that using upstart, even if it doesn't technically answer the question. Is `/proc/loadavg` system-specific or require certain permissions? – skeggse Jan 18 '14 at 20:46
Doesn't work on *BSD, but should work on every linux distribution, since procps use it (uptime is part of procps for example) https://gitorious.org/procps/procps/source/d06aaaaf2bd8f3b5f0235e75f4f04c0ad69c7d6d:proc/sysinfo.c – Riccardo Galli Jan 18 '14 at 21:58

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 31 '12 at 08:10

3

Try to split away the text before "Load Average", and then use awk on the remaining part.

uptime | sed 's/.*load average: //' | awk -F\, '{print $2}'

answered Jul 31 '12 at 08:10

Benedikt Köppel

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 31 '12 at 22:18

1

It might be simpler to read the 2nd to last field rather than the 9th or the 11th:

uptime | awk '{print $(NF-1)}' FS=,

answered Jul 31 '12 at 22:18

William Pursell

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Henk Langeveld · Answer 4 · 2012-07-31T16:51:30.883

This little shell function should work with bash or ksh(93)

    function loadavg {
        typeset minutes=$1 t1=$(uptime)
        echo ${t1#*load average: } | (
            IFS=', ' && read L1 L5 L15
            case $minutes in
            (1)  echo $L1;;
            (5)  echo $L5;;
            (15) echo $L15;;
            ("") echo $L1 $L5 $L15;;
            (*)  echo "usage: loadavg [ 1 | 5 | 15 ]" 1>& 2
            esac                
        )
    }

Explanation:

This code uses IFS to split the string after "load average: " into three fields. 'typeset' and the subshell isolate the function variables from other shell variables.

The following simplifies the result, and just returns the answer to the original question:

function load5 {
    typeset t1=$(uptime)
    echo ${t1#*load average: } | (
        IFS=', ' && read L1 L5 L15
        echo $L5            
    )
}

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 15 '12 at 06:47

0

This could give you best result I am using it to get my load average for every 5 minutes:

$ uptime | awk '{ print $11 }'| tr -d ','

answered Aug 15 '12 at 06:47

Sudheer

1

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 24 '15 at 21:11

0

So, I was having trouble writing one that worked in both Linux and Mac OS X. After much fighting I came up with this:

uptime | sed 's/.*load average[s]*://' | awk '{print $3}'

Hope this is helpful for someone.

answered Aug 24 '15 at 21:11

Jeremy Beker

33
6

Get last five minutes load average using ksh with uptime

6 Answers6