How many cores do I have in my machine?

Question

I want to install a relatively huge package on my Ubuntu 13.10 and I want to use all of the processing cores of my machine. I type

make -j N

where N is the number of available cores+1, I guess. But the problem is that I don't know how many cores do I have. How can I figure it out in Ubuntu?

Solution 1

If you run make -j without any number then it will run as many as it can without limiting to the number you provide.

Linux make man page

Solution 2

Run lscpu to get information about your cpu.nproc returns the amount of processors

Solution 3

Try this in your terminal :

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l

Solution 4

@BuysDB definitely has the simplest solution that directly answers the question, but here's another, more cross platform way to do it assuming python is installed:

python -c 'import multiprocessing as mp; print mp.cpu_count()'

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