How to check battery status using terminal?

Question

I would like a command that check the battery status through the terminal

"acpi" does not work for 11.10.

Answer 1

The below command outputs a lot status and statistical information about the battery.

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

Example output:

  native-path:          /sys/devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0C0A:00/power_supply/BAT0
  vendor:               NOTEBOOK
  model:                BAT
  serial:               0001
  power supply:         yes
  updated:              Thu Feb  9 18:42:15 2012 (1 seconds ago)
  has history:          yes
  has statistics:       yes
  battery
    present:             yes
    rechargeable:        yes
    state:               charging
    energy:              22.3998 Wh
    energy-empty:        0 Wh
    energy-full:         52.6473 Wh
    energy-full-design:  62.16 Wh
    energy-rate:         31.6905 W
    voltage:             12.191 V
    time to full:        57.3 minutes
    percentage:          42.5469%
    capacity:            84.6964%
    technology:          lithium-ion
  History (charge):
    1328809335  42.547  charging
    1328809305  42.020  charging
    1328809275  41.472  charging
    1328809245  41.008  charging
  History (rate):
    1328809335  31.691  charging
    1328809305  32.323  charging
    1328809275  33.133  charging

You could use tools like grep to get just the information you want from all that output.

One simple way: piping the above command into

grep -E "state|to\ full|percentage"

outputs:

state:               charging
time to full:        57.3 minutes
percentage:          42.5469%

If you find yourself wanting to run that regularly, you could make a bash alias for the whole thing, like:

alias bat='upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0| grep -E "state|to\ full|percentage"'

Add that to the end of your .bashrc file, and you can type 'bat' any time, in the terminal.

Answer 2

Maybe you can try:

cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info

Answer 3

I was going to suggest acpi but after reading it's not working in 11.10, I had an idea.

Please type this in your terminal: ls /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0 or BAT1

If you get a "file or directory not found" then this isn't going to work.

But, if it lists files, then here's a script [paste it into /usr/games/ or other directory in $PATH, and run sudo chmod +x /usr/games/batterypercent, or whatever you name it] that I just wrote for you that will give you an estimate battery percentage [See below]:

(Note, if not already installed, install the program calc from the repo: sudo apt-get install apcalc)

#!/bin/bash
math() { calc -d "$@"|tr -d ~; }
cd /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0;
max=$(grep 'design capacity:' info|awk '{print $3}')
current=$(grep 'remaining capacity:' state|awk '{print $3}')
percent=$(math "($current / $max) * 100");
echo $(echo $percent|cut -d. -f1)%

I have tested this script on my laptop. I say estimate above because acpi shows 93% battery, and my script shows 90% battery, so try this script against your GUI battery percentage, and see how off it is. In my case, it seems to be consistently 3% lower than acpi's percentage. In that case, you can add this line right before the last line: percent=$((percent + 3)), where "3" is the percentage it's low by.

**In my lenovo, the battery is listed as BAT1, try that too. (12.04 LTS)

Answer 4

or you can use this command as suggested by iceburn :

watch --interval=5 acpi -V