21

I need a command that I can run that returns the current utilization of wlan0.

Does such a tool exist? I would prefer something that doesn't require root privileges.

7 Answers 7

24

ifstat doesnt require root. Run it with -S to update the current line instead of printing a new line for each measurement.

egil@mutter:~$ ifstat -S
       eth0
 KB/s in  KB/s out
    0.13      0.26
1
  • 1
    After playing around with some parameters, I got this working. Thanks! Apr 29, 2011 at 18:40
11

bmon runs without root:

enter image description here

If you give it the right parameters it returns only one line

bmon -o 'ascii:noheader;quitafter=1' -p wlan0
wlan0 0.00B 0.0 0.00B 0.0

maybe this helps

5

Try iftop...

but I think that for this you need root privileges.

4

Here is a shell script that prints a short line with realtime data:

#!/bin/bash

ifstat -q -i wlan0 -S 0.1 1 | perl -n -e '/(\d+\.\d+).*(\d+\.\d+)/ && print "Down: $1 KBps - Up: $2 KBps\n"'

Sample Output:

Down: 4.25 KBps - Up: 0.00 KBps

Special thanks to Egil for his answer which pointed me to ifstat.

2

A php soulution similar to the BASH example

#!/usr/bin/php -q
<?php

define('IFSTAT', '/usr/bin/ifstat');
define('LINK', 'wlan0');

$output = exec(IFSTAT . ' -q -i ' . LINK . ' 0.1 1');

$output = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $output);

echo 'DOWN: ' . str_replace(' ', 'Kbps, UP:', trim($output)) . 'Kbps' . PHP_EOL;
2

vnstat provides daily and monthly RX and TX. No root required.

Install vnstat via synaptic. Then open a terminal and enter 'vnstat'

Don't be surprised if you don't get any results for the first day or two. It takes 2-3 days to get results which look like:

    rx:  41.61 GiB      tx:  1.84 GiB      total:  43.46 GiB

monthly rx | tx | total | avg. rate ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- Jun '11 3.55 GiB | 167.75 MiB | 3.71 GiB | 12.02 kbit/s Jul '11 38.07 GiB | 1.68 GiB | 39.74 GiB | 161.42 kbit/s ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- estimated 49.36 GiB | 2.17 GiB | 51.54 GiB |

daily rx | tx | total | avg. rate ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- yesterday 3.35 GiB | 138.04 MiB | 3.48 GiB | 338.34 kbit/s today 1.63 GiB | 84.11 MiB | 1.71 GiB | 183.41 kbit/s ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- estimated 1.80 GiB | 92 MiB | 1.89 GiB |

1

you can also check network usage/traffic monitor from nethogs. you can install it by sudo apt-get install nethogs. then launch it as sudo nethogs <Connection_name>.

Look at the image for example.

enter image description here

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