How do I get the CPU temperature?

Question

How do I get the CPU temperature?

Solution 1

Install lm-sensors

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors 

After installation type the following in terminal

sudo sensors-detect

You may also need to run

sudo service kmod start

It will ask you few questions. Answer Yes for all of them. Finally to get your CPU temperature type sensors in your terminal.

sensors

Output:

$ sensors
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:      +41.0°C  (high = +78.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)  

coretemp-isa-0001
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 1:      +41.0°C  (high = +78.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)  

w83627dhg-isa-0290
Adapter: ISA adapter
Vcore:       +1.10 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +1.74 V)   
in1:         +1.60 V  (min =  +1.68 V, max =  +1.44 V)   ALARM
AVCC:        +3.30 V  (min =  +2.98 V, max =  +3.63 V)   
VCC:         +3.28 V  (min =  +2.98 V, max =  +3.63 V)   
in4:         +1.85 V  (min =  +1.66 V, max =  +1.11 V)   ALARM
in5:         +1.26 V  (min =  +1.72 V, max =  +0.43 V)   ALARM
in6:         +0.09 V  (min =  +1.75 V, max =  +0.62 V)   ALARM
3VSB:        +3.30 V  (min =  +2.98 V, max =  +3.63 V)   
Vbat:        +3.18 V  (min =  +2.70 V, max =  +3.30 V)   
fan1:          0 RPM  (min = 10546 RPM, div = 128)  ALARM
fan2:        892 RPM  (min = 2136 RPM, div = 8)  ALARM
fan3:          0 RPM  (min = 10546 RPM, div = 128)  ALARM
fan4:          0 RPM  (min = 10546 RPM, div = 128)  ALARM
fan5:          0 RPM  (min = 10546 RPM, div = 128)  ALARM
temp1:       +36.0°C  (high = +63.0°C, hyst = +55.0°C)  sensor = diode
temp2:       +39.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)  sensor = diode
temp3:      +119.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)  ALARM  sensor = thermistor
cpu0_vid:   +2.050 V

To see HDD temperature Install hddtemp

sudo apt-get install hddtemp

Output:

$ sudo hddtemp /dev/sda        
/dev/sda: ST3160813AS: 34°C

Solution 2

Quick command-line solution; shows temperature in millidegrees Celsius (m°C)

cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/temp

Applet

If you are looking for a easier-to-access version, add a Hardware Sensors Monitor to Gnome-Panel:

1. sudo apt-get install sensors-applet - this will install the sensors-applet package

2. Right-click the panel, select Add to panel..., then select this:

3. You're done. You can configure which sensors are displayed by right-clicking the applet and selecting Preferences->Sensors.

   

Solution 3

A good indicator for monitoring temperature, fan speeds and voltage is psensor. It shows output of all sensors, draws graphs. Also selected outputs can be placed in indicator panel.

It can be installed from Ubuntu repositories by typing:

sudo apt-get install psensor

Newer versions of psensor can be installed from ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jfi/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install psensor

It can also draw graphs when you tick the boxes in the graph column:

Here is some information with more pictures.

Another useful link

In some cases not all sensors are displayed. Then you can run

sudo sensors-detect

and answer "yes" to all questions. But is not quite safe in some cases, but I never had any real problems with that. A safer way is to take default answers.

Some additional sensors may appear.

Solution 4

Temperature without third-party apps

At the time of writing, all the answers involve use of third-party utilities. If you want to find out the temperature without installing anything, use:

$ cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/temp
20000
53000
50000
53000
56000
68000
49000
50000

To see what zones the temperatures are referring to use:

$ paste <(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/type) <(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/temp) | column -s $'\t' -t | sed 's/\(.\)..$/.\1°C/'
INT3400 Thermal  20.0°C
SEN1             45.0°C
SEN2             51.0°C
SEN3             57.0°C
SEN4             59.0°C
pch_skylake      77.5°C
B0D4             50.0°C
x86_pkg_temp     51.0°C

The temperatures are stored in Celsius with 3 implied decimal places. sed is used to "prettify" output.

The last temperature is x86_pkg_temp reported at 54.0°C. For the Skylake i7 6700HQ CPU, I used this temperature for Conky display below.

Temperature with Conky

If you don't mind third-party utilities I like to use Conky--a light weight system monitor.

Conky commands

Within conky the system variable I used to monitor an Ivy Bridge CPU is:

${hwmon 2 temp 1}°C

To monitor a Skylake CPU I used:

${hwmon 0 temp 1}°C

Conky display

The conky display looks like this:

The temperature starts at 72°C with a single CPU running at 100% in turbo mode of 3200 MHz. Then turbo is switched off and temp drops 10°C to 62°C with a non-turbo speed of 2600 MHz. 10 seconds later turbo is turned back on and temperatures immediately spike back up to 72°C.

---

Controlling Temperature

After knowing your temperature you probably want to control it better. tlp works wonders for keeping system under control. It works with thermald, Intel Powerclamp, Battery vs AC for USB power, etc. Although highly configurable I've never had to change the configuration settings for a pleasant Out-Of-The-Box experience. Prior to using it I had all kinds of problems with an IvyBridge laptop overheating all the time. I have it on my new Skylake laptop and the fans NEVER run except when doing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 18.04 upgrade.

You can get a very detailed write-up with installation instructions here: Stop cpu from overheating

Solution 5

hardinfo is very useful tools to get all hardware information.

Install hard info by sudo apt-get install hardinfo. Then you can get temperature by sensors.

View more solutions

Comments

[Admin]

Related: hardware sensors, indicator and fan control.

[karthick87]

Your command-line solution may not work for all.Because the path will be different for every kernel version.

[Code.Decode]

Yeah it didn't work for me.

[Keith Thompson]

This doesn't work on all hardware. On my system, sensors always shows a temperature of +40.0°C.

[Keith Thompson]

My Ubuntu 12.04 system has no /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature; in fact there's nothing under /proc named temperature.

[knb]

On my 13.04 system, it's sudo service kmod start instead of sudo service module-init-tools start

[LAFK says Reinstate Monica]

+1 for quick command line option. Answer would benefit from adding more info about it (@mathepic comment and info about other paths possible).

[Drew Noakes]

You can run watch sensors to see temperature values updating each second.

[stommestack]

It gives warnings about being risky. Are you sure you should answer "yes" to everything? I don't think they have put those messages there for fun...

[fikr4n]

This is simpler than the answers about lm-sensors. Could you explain the difference between acpi and lm-sensors?

[Deepak Verma]

for my 14.04 system, neither command line works (No such file or directory).

[PythoNic]

@mathepic: why is it depracted? and is /sys/... still (like proc) containing zero-sized on-demand files?

[PythoNic]

Since adding panels didn't work, I went to extensions.gnome.org to find something alike.

[e-sushi]

Right… because you don’t have to install that one? Wrong! The program 'acpi' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install acpi

[frumbert]

Good looking tool, except every single page populates except Sensors (e.g. is blank)...

[Mudit Kapil]

not working for Sensors

[Nicolas Ivanov]

in Ubuntu 15.04 sudo apt-get install computertemp results in the error "Unable to locate package computertemp" ...

[spharish]

What are the three temperatures temp1, temp2, temp3? @karthick87 ?

[niceman]

I notice you have problems in your computer(many ALARMS), anyway I want to ask, what are in4 in5 in6 and if the reach the maximum what does that mean ?

[Per Lundberg]

And, it also doesn't always give the same information. On my machine, sensors provides the temperature whereas acpi -V doesn't show anything about it, unfortunately.

[Joshua K]

i like the tip about using watch, it's one of my favorites. i also recommend adding the -d option to watch to highlight the differences.

[dylnmc]

what units for cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp? Can you convert it to C/F? ... Looks like the first two digits are the first two digits preceding the decimal place and the next are those following the decimal place for Celsius.

[Peter Novotnak]

@mathepic procfs is not depreciated, using it for non-process information is.

[Karsus]

I got an answer 66000 running the command as given in the answer on fully updated 16.04.

[Karsus]

@Peter Mortensen: Mine has thermal_zone0, cooling_device0 ... cooling_device8. I 'd guess it's probably the different hardware/firmware that makes the OS create these folders in different ways? (Just guessing.)

[Pandya]

@frumbert I think it depends on lm-sensors!

[alhelal]

This work for me , but I don't understand the output. The output is : 53500 .What is the meaning of it.

[MrD]

No, that will give you the frequency. Use vcgencmd measure_temp

[MainActivity]

Psensor seems to be more advanced

[Jordan]

@BandaMuhammadAlHelal These guys explain it a bit more. cyberciti.biz/faq/… (basically your temp is 53c)

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

Thermal Zones 0 and 1 are often distorted on my Ubuntu 16.04 Kernel 4.4+ and only Thermal Zone 2 (invisible to sensors) is consistently accurate.

[Katu]

I've tried 4 machines in different locations and they all give the same reading = 27800. Do you know why this could be? They can't all have the same cpu temp.

[Edgar Magallon]

@Katu I think that might mean 27.8 degrees. I used another program and found my Core 0 was 49 C. Then I did the above command and got 49000.

[Hrvoje T]

In 2017. with systemd, it is now: sudo systemctl start kmod

[SDsolar]

I agree, @Serge. psensor is the one I am going to use.

[SDsolar]

The only output I get from the sensors command is the temp of the two cores.

[karel]

I also use Psensor.

[SDsolar]

This did not show up to be added in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in July 2017. So I uninstalled it then did a sudo apt-get autoremove

[SDsolar]

I also like the ARP table. Pretty handy to verify what is connected to my subnet.

[phil294]

what unit is this? apples? 1/1000th of °C? 59/29402th of °F?

[dirkjot]

On my Ubuntu 16.04, psensor will sometimes use 30% cpu, driving the temperature up.

[hanshenrik]

to answer yes to all sensors-detect questions, run yes yes | sensors-detect

[wjandrea]

I have it on Python 2 but it doesn't have a sensors_temperatures attribute, and I don't have it on Python 3. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04. So how do I get it?

[Lucas Aimaretto]

what version of psutil are you using? mine is 5.4.3. Try upgrading you version: sudo pip2 install psutil --upgrade.

[wjandrea]

I'm using 1.2.1 on Python 2, and the upgrade fails (but Python 2 on 14.04 is really outdated, so I'm not concerned). I just installed 5.4.3 on Python 3 with sudo pip3 install psutil --upgrade. Could you add that to your answer?

[wjandrea]

On that plot, the x-axis is CPU usage, right?

[Lucas Aimaretto]

Done the update of the answer. Yes, the X axis is CPU usgae: I'm having trouble with a laptop: is heating a lot (+65°C) with very low CPU (aprox 5%)

[Eugene]

The problem still persists. App is unusable.

[Andriy Makukha]

Benchmarks are quite outdated in this program though.

[Kanchu]

A more understandable output: cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/temp | awk '{ print ($1 / 1000) "°C" }'

[muru]

Why echo $(printf ..) and not just printf '%d°\n' $(sensors | grep 'id 0:' | awk '{ print $4 }') 2>/dev/null? ... Or even just sensors 2>/dev/null | awk '/id 0:/{printf "%d°\n", $4}'

[intika]

Yes, a lot of possibility, i just posted the one i was using

[Ercksen]

Sorry, a very painful copy & paste mistake :)

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

On Ubuntu 16.04, Skylake Laptop, acpi -t outputs nothing. It's a valid option, just doesn't work--version: acpi 1.7.

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

acpi -V is broken for Skylake laptop, Ubuntu 16.04, acpi version 1.7

[Sun]

your quote says 48000 but your text says this is 57 degrees Celsius? I'm confused.

[Sun]

This gave me 4 core temp reading on my i7-3770 on Ubuntu 16.0.4 LTS running 100% CPU (~77 degrees Celsius)

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

@Sun I had regenerated the one-liner using a newer processor and didn't revise the explanation properly. Fixed!

[reducing activity]

@raaj - is this bug reported somewhere?

[reducing activity]

@Eugene - is this bug reported somewhere?

[SDsolar]

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS already has this installed, although the output of the sensors command is much more brief.

[ablaze]

Works for me! Also shows me a graph in green color at the bottom. This tool is by far the best!

[ncoghlan]

Slight tweak to the sed command to get it to handle fractions of a degree: sed 's/\(.\)..$/.\1°C/'

[ncoghlan]

I'm wondering if there may sometimes be an extra step needed to get the kernel to actually read the board temperature sensors, as I'm currently getting 26.8 degrees for both a unit in my lab, and one out in the field, and I frankly don't believe the one in the field could be running that cool when the modem next to it is reporting a temperature of 42 degrees (similar to @Katu askubuntu.com/questions/15832/how-do-i-get-the-cpu-temperatu‌​re/… here)

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

@ncoghlan I've noticed the same thing when room temperature is 25C but sensor INT3400 Thermal always reports an impossible 20C. I simply ignore that sensor...

[Rajat]

After installing this my touch pad stops working at periodic times

[Philippe Delteil]

It's actually a pretty good script.

[Daniel Böhmer]

I successfully used acpi -t on grml live CD system to monitor the temperature of each die of an Core i3 processor. lm-sensors isn't preinstalled on grml and I can't install other packages there. grml.org

[WoJ]

great answer (+1) - psutil is a gem. It is ashame it does not cover the HDD temperature

[jocull]

Is there a way to install this on other distros besides Raspbian? For example, Ubuntu Server 19.10 is available for Raspberry Pi, but I'm not aware of how make this command available.

[Philippe Paré]

and for the gpu?

[igagis]

it was at /sys/devices/platform/coretemp.0/hwmon/hwmon*/temp*_input on my Dell Precision M4800

[wes]

What are recommended temperatures for components? Or rather, what temperatures should make me worried?

[Peeyush Kushwaha]

My system froze when I answered "yes" to one of the questions (about probing various I/O ports). Anyways, it had detected correct sensors for what I had wanted already so I just answered no to everything else and it still worked fine.

[Íhor Mé]

The only answer that worked. (Ubuntu 20.04) And almost the only one that didn't require installing anything.

[Trect]

run watch -n 0.1 sensors to check every 0.1 second

[Max Malysh]

Didn't work for me: psutil.sensors_temperatures() returns {}.

[Steven Lu]

acpi just fails with No support for device type: power_supply for me.

[Jim Raynor]

Thanks! And this is a bit off-topic, but how do you create a (such high-quality) GIF capturing a portion of the screen like that?

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

@JimRaynor The area is called screen recording and there is a Q&A about that here: askubuntu.com/questions/4428/how-can-i-record-my-screen I'm using peek which you will find instructions for on the link.

[Rohit Parte]

This worked very well!

[seeker_of_bacon]

Wow, you were NOT kidding! I thought I was going into hyperspace when I first saw that loading screen :)

[Ray Woodcock]

By default, psensor detected only two cores on a quad-core CPU. Odd.