How to get CPU utilization in % in terminal (mac)

This works on a Mac (includes the %):

ps -A -o %cpu | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s "%"}'

To break this down a bit:

ps is the process status tool. Most *nix like operating systems support it. There are a few flags we want to pass to it:

• -A means all processes, not just the ones running as you.
• -o lets us specify the output we want. In this case, it all we want to the cpu% column of ps's output.

This will get us a list of all of the processes cpu usage, like

0.0
1.3
27.0
0.0

We now need to add up this list to get a final number, so we pipe ps's output to awk. awk is a pretty powerful tool for parsing and operating on text. We just simply add up the numbers, then print out the result, and add a "%" on the end.

Building on previous answers from @Jon R. and @Rounak D, the following line prints the sum of user and system values, with the added percent. I've have tested this value and I like that it roughly tracks well with the percentages shown in the macOS Activity Monitor.

top -l  2 | grep -E "^CPU" | tail -1 | awk '{ print $3 + $5"%" }'

You can then capture that value in a variable in script like this:

cpu_percent=$(top -l  2 | grep -E "^CPU" | tail -1 | awk '{ print $3 + $5"%" }')

PS: You might also be interested in the output of uptime, which shows system load.

Adding up all those CPU % can give a number > 100% (probably multiple cores).

Here's a simpler method, although it comes with some problems:

top -l 2 | grep -E "^CPU"

This gives 2 samples, the first of which is nonsense (because it calculates CPU load between samples).

Also, you need to use RegEx like (\d+\.\d*)% or some string functions to extract values, and add "user" and "sys" values to get the total.

(From How to get CPU utilisation, RAM utilisation in MAC from commandline)

Building upon @Jon R's answer, we can pick up the user CPU utilization through some simple pattern matching

top -l 1 | grep -E "^CPU" | grep -Eo '[^[:space:]]+%' | head -1

And if you want to get rid of the last % symbol as well,

top -l 1 | grep -E "^CPU" | grep -Eo '[^[:space:]]+%' | head -1 | sed s/\%/\/