How to view battery information in Linux

Introduction

How to check your Laptop battery level from Terminal in your Linux system ? In this article, We have added three simple methods which will help you to check Laptop battery status and level in Terminal in any Linux distribution.

(1): Using Upower command:

The first thing you need to do is figure out the battery path. This can be done with the UPower –enumerate (-e) command line flag, which enumerates object paths for devices:

upower -e

•  To display the battery status using Upower, just run:

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

As you see above, my battery is 75% now.

• Also you can run the following command instead of the previous command

upower -i `upower -e | grep 'BAT'`

 Upower gives you the complete details of the installed battery such as model, vendor name, serial no, state, voltage, time to empty, percentage and icon name.

• Also you can display the status of the battery using upower command with grep command to filter your results as shown below

upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT) | grep --color=never -E "state|to\ full|to\ empty|percentage"

• You can check upower command man page with

man upower

(2): Using cat and find commands together

• To know the battery capacity with cat command , Just run

cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity

My battery level is 77% as shown above.

• To know the battery capacity with find and cat commands to display more details , Just run

find /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/ -type f | xargs -tn1 cat

qadry@rhel-pc:~$ find /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/ -type f | xargs -tn1 cat
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/uevent
POWER_SUPPLY_NAME=BAT0
POWER_SUPPLY_STATUS=Discharging
POWER_SUPPLY_PRESENT=1
POWER_SUPPLY_TECHNOLOGY=Li-ion
POWER_SUPPLY_CYCLE_COUNT=0
POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_MIN_DESIGN=11400000
POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_NOW=11676000
POWER_SUPPLY_CURRENT_NOW=1645000
POWER_SUPPLY_CHARGE_FULL_DESIGN=3909000
POWER_SUPPLY_CHARGE_FULL=3909000
POWER_SUPPLY_CHARGE_NOW=3040000
POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY=77
POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY_LEVEL=Normal
POWER_SUPPLY_MODEL_NAME=Primary
POWER_SUPPLY_MANUFACTURER=Hewlett-Packard
POWER_SUPPLY_SERIAL_NUMBER=00000 2014/05/02
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full_design
3909000
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/serial_number
00000 2014/05/02
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/technology
Li-ion
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/current_now
1645000
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_now
3040000
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/present
1
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_active_time
0
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_status
unsupported
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/autosuspend_delay_ms
cat: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/autosuspend_delay_ms: Input/output error
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_suspended_time
0
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/control
auto
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/manufacturer
Hewlett-Packard
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/type
Battery
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full
3909000
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity
77
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/cycle_count
0
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/voltage_now
11676000
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status
Discharging
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/alarm
0
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/model_name
Primary
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/voltage_min_design
11400000
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity_level
Normal
qadry@rhel-pc:~$

(3): Using battery-level-cli Program

Battery level will only display the battery level. It won’t help you to find whether the battery is charging or not. It is written in NodeJS

NOTE: If nodejs is not installed in your system, then visit the following Link to install it How to Install Latest NodeJS and NPM in Linux

• After that install battery-level-cli utility

sudo npm install --global battery-level-cli

• Display the battery level using the command below

battery-level

Conclusion

That’s it..

In this article, we illustrate a three methods to view battery information in Linux

Thank you