OS X Battery Percentage Command Line

Quick and easy utility to get OS X battery usage from the command line.

Recently I learned how to enable full screen console mode for OS X but the first issue I ran into was trying to determine how far gone the battery in my laptop was. Yes of course I could use the fancy little button on the side that lights up and shows me but that would be way too easy for a programmer, so of course instead I wrote this scripts. The script will gather the battery current and max capacity and simply divide them to give you a percentage of battery life left.

Just create this script, I named mine “battery”, make sure to enable execution “chmod +x battery” and I moved mine into “/usr/sbin/”. Then to use simply run the command “battery” and you’ll get an output similar to “3.900%” (yes as of the writing of this my battery needs a charging).

#!/bin/bash
current=`ioreg -l | grep CurrentCapacity | awk ‘{print %5}’`
max=`ioreg -l | grep MaxCapacity| awk ‘{print %5}’`
echo `echo “scale=3;$current/$max*100″|bc -l`’%’

Enjoy!