Finding your Laptop battery status in GUI mode is easy. You could easily tell the battery level by hovering the mouse pointer over the battery indicator icon in the task/top bar. But, how about from the command line? Not everyone know this. The other day a friend of mine asked how to check his Laptop battery level from Terminal in his Ubuntu desktop - hence this post. Here I have included four simple methods which will help you to check Laptop battery status and level in Terminal in any Linux distribution.

Check Laptop Battery Status And Level In Terminal In Linux

We can find the Laptop battery status from command line in three methods.

Method 1 - Using "Upower" command

The Upower command comes preinstalled with most Linux distributions. To display the battery status using Upower, open up the Terminal and run:

$ upower - i / org / freedesktop / UPower / devices / battery_BAT0

Sample output:

native-path: BAT0 vendor: Samsung SDI model: DELL 7XFJJA2 serial: 4448 power supply: yes updated: Tuesday 01 October 2019 12:50:41 PM IST (101 seconds ago) has history: yes has statistics: yes battery present: yes rechargeable: yes state: fully-charged warning-level: none energy: 33.4443 Wh energy-empty: 0 Wh energy-full: 33.4443 Wh energy-full-design: 48.84 Wh energy-rate: 0.0111 W voltage: 12.446 V percentage: 100% capacity: 68.4773% technology: lithium-ion icon-name: 'battery-full-charged-symbolic'

As you see above, my battery is fully-charged now and the battery level is 100%.

If the above command doesn't work for any reason, try the following command instead:

$ upower -i `upower -e | grep 'BAT'`

Sample output:

native-path: BAT0 vendor: Samsung SDI model: DELL 7XFJJA2 serial: 4448 power supply: yes updated: Tuesday 01 October 2019 12:54:41 PM IST (48 seconds ago) has history: yes has statistics: yes battery present: yes rechargeable: yes state: fully-charged warning-level: none energy: 33.4443 Wh energy-empty: 0 Wh energy-full: 33.4443 Wh energy-full-design: 48.84 Wh energy-rate: 0.0111 W voltage: 12.446 V percentage: 100% capacity: 68.4773% technology: lithium-ion icon-name: 'battery-full-charged-symbolic'

Upower not just display the battery status, but also the complete details of the installed battery such as model, vendor name, serial no, state, voltage etc.

You can also display the status of the battery only by with combination of upower and grep commands as shown below.

$ upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT) | grep --color=never -E "state|to\ full|to\ empty|percentage"

Sample output:

state: fully-charged percentage: 100

As you see in the above output, my Laptop battery has been fully charged.

For more details, refer man pages.

$ man upower

Method 2 - Using "acpi" command

The acpi command shows battery status and other ACPI information in your Linux distribution.

You might need to install acpi command in some Linux distributions.

On Arch Linux and its derivatives:

$ sudo pacman -S acpi

To install acpi on Debian, Ubuntu and its derivatives:

$ sudo apt-get install acpi

On RHEL, CentOS, Fedora:

$ sudo yum install acpi

Or,

$ sudo dnf install acpi

Once acpi installed, run the following command:

$ acpi -V

Note: Here, "V" is capital letter.

Sample output:

Battery 0: Discharging, 98%, 01:43:14 remaining Battery 0: design capacity 4400 mAh, last full capacity 3013 mAh = 68% Battery 1: Discharging, 0%, rate information unavailable Adapter 0: off-line Thermal 0: ok, 60.5 degrees C Thermal 0: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 84.0 degrees C Cooling 0: Processor 0 of 3 Cooling 1: intel_powerclamp no state information available Cooling 2: Processor 0 of 3 Cooling 3: x86_pkg_temp no state information available Cooling 4: Processor 0 of 3 Cooling 5: LCD 0 of 15 Cooling 6: Processor 0 of 3

To check only the state of the charge of battery. To do so, run:

$ acpi

Sample output:

Battery 0: Discharging, 98%, 01:48:14 remaining Battery 1: Discharging, 0%, rate information unavailable

Check the battery temperature:

$ acpi -t

Sample output:

Thermal 0: ok, 58.5 degrees C

We can view the above output in Fahrenheit using -f flag:

$ acpi -t -f

Sample output:

Thermal 0: ok, 144.5 degrees F

Want to know whether the AC power is connected or not? Simple! Simply run the following command:

$ acpi -a

Sample output:

Adapter 0: on-line

If the AC power is not available, you would the see the following instead:

Adapter 0: off-line

For more details, check the man pages.

$ man acpi

Method 3: Using "cat" and "find" commands

This was suggested by one of our reader in the comment section.

We can use cat and find command to display the battery details.

To know only the battery capacity, run:

$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity

Sample output:

89

Here, my battery level is 89%.

For all details about the battery, the command would be:

$ find /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/ -type f | xargs -tn1 cat

Sample output:

cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/uevent POWER_SUPPLY_NAME=BAT0 POWER_SUPPLY_STATUS=Discharging POWER_SUPPLY_PRESENT=1 POWER_SUPPLY_TECHNOLOGY=Li-ion POWER_SUPPLY_CYCLE_COUNT=0 POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_MIN_DESIGN=11100000 POWER_SUPPLY_VOLTAGE_NOW=11646000 POWER_SUPPLY_CURRENT_NOW=1905000 POWER_SUPPLY_CHARGE_FULL_DESIGN=4400000 POWER_SUPPLY_CHARGE_FULL=3013000 POWER_SUPPLY_CHARGE_NOW=2696000 POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY=89 POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY_LEVEL=Normal POWER_SUPPLY_MODEL_NAME=DELL 7XFJJA2 POWER_SUPPLY_MANUFACTURER=Samsung SDI POWER_SUPPLY_SERIAL_NUMBER= 4448 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full_design 4400000 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/serial_number 4448 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/technology Li-ion cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/current_now 1905000 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_now 2696000 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/present 1 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_active_time 0 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_active_kids 0 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_usage 0 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_status unsupported cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/autosuspend_delay_ms cat: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/autosuspend_delay_ms: Input/output error cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/async disabled cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_suspended_time 0 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/runtime_enabled disabled cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power/control auto cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/manufacturer Samsung SDI cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/type Battery cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full 3013000 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity 89 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/cycle_count 0 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/voltage_now 11646000 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status Discharging cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/alarm 0 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/model_name DELL 7XFJJA2 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/voltage_min_design 11100000 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity_level Normal

Method 4: Using "Batstat" Program

The batstat is a small ncurses-based CLI utility to display your Laptop battery status in Unix-like systems. It will display the following details:

Current battery level

Current Energy

Full charge energy

Time elapsed from the start of the program, without tracking the sleep time of the machine.

Battery level history

Installing batstat is a piece of cake.

Git clone the latest version using command:

$ git clone https://github.com/Juve45/batstat.git

The above command will pull the latest batstat version and save its contents in a folder named "batstat".

Cd into batstat/bin/ directory:

$ cd batstat/bin/

Copy "batstat" binary file to your PATH, for example /usr/local/bin/.

$ sudo cp batstat /usr/local/bin/

Make it executable using command:

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/batstat

Finally, run the following command to view your battery status.

$ batstat

Sample output:

As you see in the above screenshot, my battery is in charging mode.

This utility has some limitations though. As of writing this guide, batstat will support only one battery. And, it gathers information only from this folder - "/sys/class/power_supply/". If your machine contains the battery information on a different folder, this program will not work.

For more details, check batstat github page.

Method 5: Using "battery-level-cli" Program

The battery-level-cli is yet another command line utility to display the battery level in Linux. Unlike the "batstat" program, it will only display the battery level. It won't help you to find whether the battery is charging or not. It is written in NodeJS, so make sure your system has NodeJS installed. If nodejs is not installed, refer the following to know how to install it.

Once NodeJS installed, tun the following command to install "battery-level-cli" utility:

$ npm install --global battery-level-cli

Now, you can view the battery level using command:

$ battery-level 100%

For more details, check the project's GitHub repository:

Conclusion

There might be many commands and programs out there to check the laptop battery status from Terminal in Linux. As far as I know, the above given methods have worked just fine as expected. If you know some other commands/utilities to find out the battery status, let me know in the comment section below. I will check and add them as well.