Filed under: Software, Freeware, UNIX / BSD
GeekTool: Run UNIX Commands on the Desktop
Today I ran across this excellent tutorial on lifehacker about using GeekTool, and I was amazed to discover we haven't mentioned it here at TUAW. GeekTool is a cool little preference pane which allows you to run terminal commands, show logs, or even display pictures (e.g. from the net) directly on your desktop. Common uses include running the command top which displays which processes are utilizing the most system resources, displaying the console log, or even putting a live weather map (from the net) on your desktop. As I mentioned before, Gina at lifehacker has an extensive discussion of how it can be used. So, TUAWers, what sort of commands do you like to run in GeekTool?GeekTool is open source and a free download from Tynsoe; donations are requested.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
sam said 6:43PM on 3-15-2007
Here's some cool things I have on my desktop using geektool, besides the examples in the lifehacker article. I either found these around on the net or figured them out myself.
To see lyrics of current itunes track:
osascript -e '''tell application "iTunes" to set currentLyrics to the lyrics of the current track'''
To see current homeland security threat level:
curl -s http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition | grep CONDITION
See internal IP address
ifconfig en1 | GREP inet
See how much freespace is left on your drives (replace drive names with the names of your drives). Save this as a script, and call it with sh /users/username/library/scripts/usage.sh
bdg=`df -h | grep "disk0s2" | awk '{print $4}'`
echo "Mac : $bdg"
bdf=`df -h | grep "Untitled" | awk '{print $4}'`
echo "Windoze : $bdf"
What other cool commands are you guys using?
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Sumsa said 9:03PM on 3-15-2007
@ sam: Whoa! Didn´t expect to see my own iTunes-GeekTool-tip from Lifehacker featured over here at TUAW! Nice find ;-)
Besides that I´m using GeekTool and lynx (true geek) at work to display the current toner levels of ~15 printers (and yes, I´m in charge of replacing the toner), to display my system.log, ipfw.log, current temperature of my mac, todo.txt and some server´s status. Cool, or what?
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Jonas Wisser said 8:01AM on 3-16-2007
I use GeekTool along with a home-rolled Applescript app to put title, artist, album, length, and lyrics of the currenly playing song on my desktop. Over spring break, I'm going to work up another to show the album art.
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Mike Piatek-Jimenez said 8:53AM on 3-16-2007
I use a couple of different scripts to show CPU, Memory, and Disk usage...
CPU (shows up to 20 processes and their CPU usage, only shows processes that are using the CPU):
echo "CPU Usage" && ps -arcx -o %cpu,command | awk ' { if (FNR
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Mike Piatek-Jimenez said 9:07AM on 3-16-2007
Hmm, that's not what I posted...seems to cut out on the special characters. There is a topic over on the XRG forum with some cool GeekTool commands. Check the bottom of the topic for three commands to list top CPU and Memory processes, and disk usage. There are also some hints on getting an image toggle working based on shell script output.
http://forums.gauchosoft.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1096675648/15
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sam said 9:26PM on 3-20-2007
Anyone know why I can't get this command to work?
curl -s http://commuterlink.utah.gov/alerts/latest.asp | w3m -dump -T text/html
Works fine in terminal, but don't see any output with geektool. (Need to have w3m installed)
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Nick Young said 4:31PM on 4-11-2007
I've been playing around with GeekTool the last few days and all I can say is that I'm in love. After scouring the net for scripts/commands I ended up with my current GeekTool Desktop Display.
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Nick Young said 4:32PM on 4-11-2007
Link didn't go through :(
http://www.keynote2keynote.com/2007/04/10/ultimate-geektool-setup-pimp-your-desktop-part-2/
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