Battery stats

Battery stats

- 3 mins

Checking the battery status through GUI is easy on a Linux system. Hovering the mouse cursor over the battery indicator given in the Laptop task bar simply shows the battery level. But what about when your remotely on a computer that lost connection to its charger, what then? As I have gone through my more and troubleshooting on my computer or on a server the CLI is my home, so i’m always looking for a way to stay home and get things done. I have found 4 different methods of checking laptop battery status using the Linux command line.

upower

The upower command-line tool helps extract information related to the power source (batteries). It provides an interface to list down all the power sources of your PC or laptop.

Options Used with the upower Command

–monitor: You can print a line each time a battery or power source is added by connecting –monitor to upower. It also produces outputs while the power sources are removed or changed.

–monitor-detail: This option prints the full power source detail whenever an event occurs.

upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0

upower -i `upower -e | grep 'BAT'`

upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT) | grep --color=never -E "state|to\ full|to\ empty|percentage"

Use cat and find

The “cat” and “find” commands also help find details about your battery and power source. For the battery capacity, the syntax would be:

cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity

For more detailed battery information use the find command.


find /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/ -type f | xargs -tn1 cat

Check Battery Status with acpi Command

The acpi command extracts information from the /sys or the /proc filesystem. You get to know the battery status and thermal information using acpi.

Options Used with the acpi Command

-b: The shortened form of –battery and it gives battery details.

-t: The shortened form of –thermal and shows thermal details.

-a: The shortened form of –ac-adapter to give ac adapter details.

-c: The abbreviation of –cooling. It gives information regarding your cooling device.

-V: Stands for –everything. It produces output about every device connected and overrides other options.

-f: The abbreviation of –fahrenheit. Once given as input, -f produces temperature results in fahrenheit units instead of celsius.

-i: The abbreviation of –details. It shows additional battery details, such as battery capacity or temperature trip points.

-s: The short form of –show-empty. It shows non-operational devices.


acpi -V

acpi -t

Additional packages

Use the batstat application

The batstat is a ncurses-based CLI utility. It displays the laptop battery status in Linux. Using batstat you’ll get full charge energy, current energy, level of the battery, battery level history, and the time passed from the beginning of the program. It doesn’t count the sleep time of your machine.

Steps to View Your Battery Status with batstat

Step 1: Install batstat in your machine by:

git clone https://gitlab.com/Juve45/batstat.git

Git cone helps clone the latest version of batstat available. And it’ll create a folder named “batstat” to save all the contents.

Step 2: Then change the current directory to batstat/bin/ directory typing:
cd batstat/bin/

Step 3: Bring batstat binary file copied to the PATH, for instance, /usr/local/bin/

sudo cp batstat /usr/local/bin/

Step 4: Make the file executable using:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/batstat

Step 5: View the battery status through:

batstat
The Conclusion

I have found all of these useful and spent an entire weekend finding the right tools for the job. Creating aliases to get this done quickly. Thought it would be worth-while to share.