Parsing command with lots of quotes " and '

[elyahw]

I have the following command to display CPU utilisation:

top -bn1 | grep "Cpu(s)" | sed "s/.*, *\([0-9.]*\)%* id.*/\1/" | awk '{print 100 - $1"%"}'

I can run it from terminal like so:

bash -c "top -bn1 | grep Cpu\\(s\\) | sed --expression=\"s/.*, *\\([0-9.]*\\)%* id.*/\1/\""

But when I put it inside awesome, I get an empty string:

myCPUusage = awful.widget.watch('bash -c "top -bn1 | grep Cpu\\(s\\) | sed \"s/.*, *\\([0-9.]*\\)%* id.*/\1/\""', 1)

Is there an alternative way of evaluating complex commands?

[actionless]

google://escape character in lua
google://multiline strings in lua

[elyahw]

Thanks. It was solved by rewriting it in another way:

command_to_print_CPU_usage='bash -c "top -bn1 | grep Cpu | cut -d , -f 4 | xargs | head -c -4 | cut -d. -f1 | awk \'{print 100 - $1\\"%\\"}\' "'

[actionless]

also, that's offtopic from the point of your question, regarding escape characters, but i'd suggest to use short load average value instead of momentary utilization %:

bash -c 'echo scale=2\; $(cat /proc/loadavg | cut -d" " -f1) / $(nproc) | bc | sed "s/^\./0./g"'

or, to display it as %:

bash -c 'echo scale=2\; $(cat /proc/loadavg | cut -d" " -f1) / $(nproc) "*" 100 | bc | sed "s/^\./0./g"'

100% would mean full utilization of all cpus/cores, and >100% would mean that amount of processes is more than current cpus could handle, so some of them are queued

[actionless]

idk, try to experiment with escaping, for me it works:

[elyahw]

for me it works:

Yes yes, from the terminal it works for me too. But I meant from inside awesomewm where it doens't work!

[actionless]

just try it little by little by adding one command after another, i know you can do it 💪

[actionless]

also, better use table instead of string for command: https://awesomewm.org/doc/api/classes/awful.widget.watch.html#awful.widget.watch:new

[actionless]

btw i just noticed that scale= parameter in bc affecting not just display of the value, but also computation precision, so the better way do it like that:

bash -c 'printf "%2.2f%%\n" $(echo scale=10\; $(cat /proc/loadavg | cut -d" " -f1) / $(nproc) "*" 100 | bc )'