Simple way of getting bandwidth usage using the Terminal

[ChrisUK]

This might help someone:

Nowadays, most seem to have uncapped bandwidth - for those that don't: vnstat is the perfect tool to monitor what you've downloaded/uploaded each day. For those that don't need or want a daemon running, you can just run a command in the terminal.

You could run

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ifconfig

which will give you details of all interfaces, including downloaded/uploaded bytes per interface. If you wanted to log those bytes, you'd probably need to use awk and/or sed to filter the information gained from ifconfig. But if you just wanted a single line to type in the terminal (or use in a script for logging purposes... replacing cat with echo) that will give you the formatted bytes downloaded since boot, you could type the following (assuming wlan0 is the interface)

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cat /sys/class/net/wlan0/statistics/rx_bytes | numfmt --to iec --format "%8.4f"

If you have a look in /sys/class/net/<YOUR_NETWORK_INTERFACE>/statistics/ (replacing <YOUR_NETWORK_INTERFACE> with eth0 or wlan0 etc) - you'll see there's a lot of info monitored/stored (bytes/packets/errors etc) - so it would be easy to get further info (eg. just change rx_bytes to tx_bytes in the above one-liner to get bytes uploaded)

[oops]

Thank you, can be useful
or.

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cat /sys/class/net/*/statistics/rx_bytes | numfmt --to iec --format "%8.4f"

# * for:
# ls /sys/class/net/
# eth0/  lo/    wlan0/