What is a command line alternative to top for finding current CPU utilization that isn't dependent on screen width?

Question

If I run top -p <myPID> -n 1 with a terminal that isn't wide enough, the CPU utilization % is omitted from the output. When trying to find a process' cpu utilization via bash scripting, this is a huge problem, as the script won't work if the terminal you're running it in isn't wide enough.

ps -oe pcpu,pid,cmd will give me the total average cpu, but not a running utilization.

Is there a command that I can use to get the current cpu utilization of a process that isn't dependent on terminal width?

Solution 1

The sysstat package includes mpstat. Running

mpstat 2 | awk '{print $11}'

Gave me the idle-time percentage which seems like the inverse of what you want, so you might need to do a little work on mpstat output:

8 % mpstat 2 | awk '{print $11}'

%idle
100.00
99.50
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00

I had mpstat on my Slackware 11 system, but it didn't appear on my Arch system until I did pacman -S sysstat

Solution 2

In your script, set the COLUMNS environment variable to be sufficiently high to get the output you need.

export COLUMNS=100
top -p ... 

You could also change the COLUMNS var just for the top invocation thusly:

COLUMNS=100 top -p ...

Solution 3

ps u -p <PID>

Works fine. you also might try using awk with it:

 pid=16707; ps u -p $pid --no-heading | awk -v pid=${pid} -F" " '{print "CPU usage for "$11": "$3}'

Solution 4

You could just use the f key to adjust the columns displayed. Remove some columns and add the CPU%. You should be able to see it then.

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Comments

[cjm]

He's trying to do this from a script. As far as I can tell, top doesn't have a command-line option to specify columns.

[Keith]

Well how about a Python script? Use the CPUMeasurer object from the procfs module.

[Cory Klein]

Yea, you can't use the interactive features of top from a script, so this won't work.

[Cory Klein]

This doesn't work either. I need the current cpu utilization. ps just gives the total average historical utilization.

[Keith]

My script doesn't use top, it computes CPU utilization directly the same way top does.

[laebshade]

Try this one: top -n 1 -p 13145 | grep PID --after 1 | grep -v PID | awk -F" " '{print $1}'

[Cory Klein]

I can't use top, because if the window running the shell is too narrow, top won't display the CPU info.