System monitoring polybar modules

A couple of days ago I sumbled upon this video by Luke Smith where he presented a couple of scripts to display CPU, memory and temperature information in i3blocks. Since I use polybar due to it working much better in tandem with my dual-monitor setup with different DPIs, I decided I’d adapt and change the scripts to work in polybar. Polybar already comes with memory, CPU and temperature modules by default, but they don’t include a popup showing the top-consuming processes, which is a nice feature to have.

You can find all these files in my dotfiles repo.

For this setup we need two bash scripts, memory.sh and cpu.sh, and a few extra lines in the polybar config file ~/.config/polybar/config to set up the modules. Let’s see the details.

memory.sh

This script prints the amount of used memory with respect to the total available memory (uG/tG). If invoked with --popup, it brings up a notify-send popup with the top 10 memory intensive processes in the system.

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
    --popup)
        notify-send "Memory (%)" "$(ps axch -o cmd:10,pmem k -pmem | head | awk '$0=$0"%"' )"
        ;;
    *)
        echo " $(free -h --si | awk '/^Mem:/ {print $3 "/" $2}')"
        ;;
esac

cpu.sh

This is very similar to the memory script. It prints CPU usage and temperature, and a popup with a list of the top 10 CPU processes when invoked with --popup.

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
    --popup)
        notify-send "CPU time (%)" "$(ps axch -o cmd:10,pcpu k -pcpu | head | awk '$0=$0"%"' )"
        ;;
    *)
        echo " $(grep 'cpu ' /proc/stat | awk '{cpu_usage=($2+$4)*100/($2+$4+$5)}
        END {printf "%0.2f%", cpu_usage}')
         $(sensors | grep temp1 | head -1 | awk '{print $2}')"
        ;;
esac

Polybar configuration

Finally, in our polybar configuration file, we need to create the modules like this:

[bar/my-bar]
...
modules-right = [...] memory-info cpu-info [...]

[module/memory-info]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/memory.sh
click-left = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/memory.sh --popup
format-underline = ${colors.primary}

[module/cpu-info]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/cpu.sh
click-left = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/cpu.sh --popup
format-underline = ${colors.primary}

That is all, just remember to modify the path to the script files.