What if you are too geek like me who want to check even battery status from a command line. We can easily get the battery status from GUI, but what if we want all the battery related information from a command line. Sounds interesting? Okay, We will see two Linux commands to find battery related information in this article.
The battery status and ACPI information is stored in /proc and /sys directory. Using "upower" command or "acpi" command you can get this information.
upower command
upower is a command line tool which provides an interface to enumerate power sources on the system. Execute below command in the terminal. You can get "/org/..." path by executing "upower -e". This command will show detailed information about the battery. An output of the command is easily understandable.
$ upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1
native-path: BAT1
vendor: 13-14
model: OA04041
serial: 08726 06/19/2014
power supply: yes
updated: Tuesday 15 August 2017 11:41:01 PM IST (23 seconds ago)
has history: yes
has statistics: yes
battery
present: yes
rechargeable: yes
state: discharging
energy: 18.7664 Wh
energy-empty: 0 Wh
energy-full: 32.2048 Wh
energy-full-design: 32.2492 Wh
energy-rate: 10.0936 W
voltage: 14.982 V
time to empty: 1.9 hours
percentage: 58%
capacity: 99.8623%
technology: lithium-ion
History (charge):
1502820602 58.000 discharging
History (rate):
1502820661 10.094 discharging
1502820602 8.895 discharging
1502820572 8.791 discharging
You can use tools like grep to filter out the information you want from all that output. Now, I want to see only important information like stage, time remaining for full charge, current battery level in percentage. So, you can get only that by executing below command.
$upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1|grep -E "state|to\ full|percentage"
state: charging
time to full: 1.7 hours
percentage: 54%
acpi command
acpi command shows infromation about acpi from /proc and /sys directory and battery status. You might have to install acpi on your system.
To Install it, first, update the packages list available in the repositories by executing below command on your system
$ sudo apt-get update
Now, execute the following command to install acpi
sudo apt-get install acpi
Great, Now acpi is installed.
Now, execute a command "acpi -V". It will give you detailed information about the battery.
$ acpi -V Battery 0: Charging, 62%, 00:49:20 until charged Battery 0: design capacity 2116 mAh, last full capacity 2116 mAh = 100% Adapter 0: on-line Thermal 0: ok, 27.8 degrees C Thermal 0: trip point 0 switches to mode hot at temperature 83.0 degrees C Thermal 1: ok, 50.0 degrees C Thermal 1: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 105.0 degrees C Thermal 1: trip point 1 switches to mode passive at temperature 108.0 degrees C Thermal 2: ok, 50.0 degrees C Thermal 2: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 105.0 degrees C Thermal 2: trip point 1 switches to mode active at temperature 100.0 degrees C Thermal 2: trip point 2 switches to mode active at temperature 55.0 degrees C Cooling 0: x86_pkg_temp no state information available Cooling 1: intel_powerclamp no state information available Cooling 2: Processor 0 of 10 Cooling 3: Processor 0 of 10 Cooling 4: Processor 0 of 10 Cooling 5: Processor 0 of 10 Cooling 6: Fan 0 of 1
Execute acpi command to see status of battery
$ acpi Battery 0: Charging, 63%, 00:47:24 until charged
You can check battery temperature by executing below command. To see in Fahrenheit append '-f' at end.
$ acpi -t Thermal 0: ok, 44.5 degrees C
If you want to check power adapter is connected or not, execute below command.
$ acpi -a Adapter 0: on-line
acpi has many more options to run with. Just run "man acpi", you will get more options
$man acpi
OPTIONS
-b | --battery
show battery information
-a | --ac-adapter
show ac adapter information
-t | --thermal
show thermal information
-c | --cooling
show cooling device information
-V | --everything
show every device, overrides above options
-s | --show-empty
show non-operational devices
-i | --details
show additional details if available:
* battery capacity information
* temperature trip points
-f | --fahrenheit
use fahrenheit as the temperature unit instead of default celsius
-k | --kelvin
use kelvin as the temperature unit instead of default celsius
-p | --proc
use the old /proc interface, default is the new /sys one
-d | --directory
path to ACPI info (either /proc/acpi or /sys/class)
-h | --help
display help and exit
-v | --version
output version information and exit
That's it for this article. We have covered two commands to check battery status, Both of these are enough to check various battery related information, If you know or came across some other command or tool, Please share in the comments section and help the community.
