A Small List of Common GeekTool User Commands

Tina Brunner — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:37:06 +0000

Last week, I wrote an article about GeekTool and its uses. I decided that it would be nice to create a list of some of the most common user commands that I’ve found online so that others may benefit the great features of GeekTool. I am using GeekTool 3 for the commands. To the right is a preview of the GeekTool pane area (just click it to enlarge). So let’s get to the commands….

Month:
date +%B

Day of Month:
date +%d

Full Date:
date "+%A, %B %d"

Day of Week:
date +%A

Time:
date +"%l:%M"

AM/PM:
date +"%p"

Current Calendar Month
This is just a simple, small calendar:
cal

Simple Horizontal Calendar:

cal | sed -e '1d' -e '2p;2p;2p;2p' | sed -e '$!N;s/\n/ /' -e '$!N;s/\n/ /' -e '$!N;s/\n/ /' -e '$!N;s/\n/ /' | sed "s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/ $(date +%e) /\|$(date +%e)\|/"

Weather Conditions:

lynx -dump http://printer.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=51501|awk '/Cond/ && !/Fore/ {for (i=2; i<=10; i++) printf $i " " }'

Historical Events:
curl http://www.infoplease.com/rss/dayinhistory.rss | grep CDATA | sed -e 's/$.*\[$//' -e 's/\].*//'

Quote of the Day:

curl http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/feeds/rssfeed.aspx?type=quote | grep description | sed -e 's/\(.*\)//' -e 's/<\/description>.*//'

Current Homeland Security Level (which will most likely show ‘Elevated’:
curl -s http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition | grep CONDITION

RAM:
top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {print "" $8 " "}' ;

CPU:
top -l 2 | awk '/CPU usage/ && NR > 5 {print $12, $13}'

IP Address
If you simply want to know your IP Address, this sort of command can be very helpful.
echo External IP: `curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[a-zA-Z<>/ :]//g'`

Apple Views » user commands

A Small List of Common GeekTool User Commands