Home / ubuntu / Questions / 717421
In Process
sps
Asked: 2016-01-06 15:45:52 +0800 CST

How to see current interface/wifi speed

  • 772

I can see the download and upload speed for all interfaces using glances. In the network section we can see the Rx/s and Tx/s columns where I can see the value in Mbps.

However I want to store this value in a variable. Is there any other command, which gives the current speed (bps, or Kbps, or Mbps) so that I can save that value in a variable in a bash script ?

I want to do this for wlan0 interface.

networking

1 Answers

  1. There is not a single command to do this. However, you could use this: 

    eval $( \
    iwconfig wlan0 | \
    egrep -o 'Bit Rate=[0-9]+ [^ ]+' | \
    sed -e 's/ /_/;s/=/="/;s/$/"/' \
    )
echo $Bit_Rate

    On my system, currently, I get: 

    $ eval $(iwconfig wlan0 | egrep -o 'Bit Rate=[0-9]+ [^ ]+' | sed -e 's/ /_/;s/=/="/;s/$/"/')
$ echo $Bit_Rate
54 Mb/s

    iwconfig wlan0 outputs a bunch of information about wlan0 (try it and see).

    Then egrep matches "Bit Rate=", followed by 1 or more digits, a blank, and 1 or more non-blanks. Because of the -o option, egrep outputs only the matched string.

    sed then changes the first blank to an underscore, the '=' to '="', and the end-of-line to '"', producing a string like Bit_Rate="54 Mb/s".

    eval then interprets that string in your current shell.

    for further education, read 

    for i in iwconfig egrep sed bash ; do  
    man $i
done
    • 1