I wrote a script for my dwm statusbar. One part of it is finding the current cpu usage for every single core on my system. I figured out a way myself but I would need some help fixing a bug in this. Here is the command: top -bn 2 -d 0.5 | grep -F '%Cpu' | tail -n 4 | awk '{print $3}'. This assumes that your top shows every core per default. You can achieve this by issuing top then pressing 1 and then pressing W to save the current configuration to a .toprc file in your home folder. Everytime you open top now it will display all of your cores. My aforementioned command has the drawback that when assigned to a variable like this:
CPU=$(top -bn 2 -d 0.5 | grep -F '%Cpu' | tail -n 4 | awk '{print $3}')
and then using $CPU with xsetroot like this: xsetroot -name "$CPU" I will get the output I want in my statusbar but between every cpu percentage there will be two symbols on top of each other separating them v and t. How do I get rid of them? Has this something to do that I might be using an array instead of a string here?
You can see the problem on the left side of the picture.
Command:
top -bn 2 -d 0.5 | grep -F '%Cpu' | tail -n 4 | awk '{print $3}'
sample output:
14.3
12.0
8.0
10.0
Note for anyone using this script: When the cpu usage for a core reaches 100% the array that the command outputs will move the column with the current load from column 3 to column 2. Hence, with awk '{print $3}' you will then see us, as output for column 3. If you're fine with that leave it. If not you could have awk print column 2 as well. It will just be :. A solution that avoids all those pitfalls is:
top -bn 2 | grep -F '%Cpu' | tail -n 4 | gawk '{print $2 $3}' | tr -s '\n\:\,[:alpha:]' ' '
