I am using Geektool on my Mac for many different tasks, so i thought about collecting some of those scripts here for my readers.

As always i’m open for comments, additional scripts and similar, so just use the comment function if you are missing some great snippet.

About Geektool

Just a few words regarding Geektool, as i expect most users know the application already based on experiences or older post in this blog.

What it is

GeekTool is a preference pane module that lets you display 3 different types of information on your desktop:

• Log files
  Choose one or more log files (usually in /var/log directory) they will be shown in real time where you wish to see them.
  Common files are /var/log/system.log, /var/tmp/console.log, /var/log/httpd/*
• Commands
  Specify unix (or shell) commands, and the output will be available anywhere, you will also have to type a refresh time.
  Common commands are uptime, df, netstat, vm_stat, ifconfig… You can pipe sed or awk scripts to filter outputs.
• Pictures
  Grab any picture on the internet with its URL, and assign a frame type, transparency and so on…
  Common pictures are MRTG/RRD/Cacti graphs, webcams…

Additionaly, you can set “always on top” windows to keep a constant eye on certain information, as your clicks always goes through to not disturb your habits

How it looks like

Development

If you are wondering like me if Geektool is still developed, i got good news for you.
Balthamos is working on Geektool 3 – hosted at GitHub. So if you are into programming and want to share your almighty power, consider helping this project

Geektool Snippets

I’ll try to post code & the output to give a better impression how it could look like

Displaying a calender on your Desktop

Code:

cal

or more advanced:

cal | sed “s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/ $(date +%e) / $(date +%e | sed ’s/./#/g’) /”

Result:

or for even more fun (thx to Ice|House in irc)

Code:

cat /usr/share/calendar/cal* | grep `date +”%m/%d”` && cat /usr/share/calendar/de_DE.ISO8859-1/* | grep `date +”%m/%d”`

Result:

Displaying free disk space on your Desktop

Code:

bdg=`df -h | grep “disk0s2″ | awk ‘{print $4}’`
echo “free on Mac : $bdg”

Result:

You need to replace the name of the disk (here: disk0s2) for sure, but that should be easily done after running the mount command in your terminal.

Displaying top processes on your Desktop

Code:

top -orsize -FR -l1 | grep % | grep -v Load | grep -v COMMAND | cut -c 7-19,64-69

Result:

Displaying uptime on your Desktop

Code:

uptime

Result:

Displaying random comic strips on your Desktop

That one is a bit more complex ( as it included getting images, selecting a random out of the collection etc), so i do have a single post for this task. Consider reading here.

Displaying text file on your Desktop

Code:

more /Path/to/your/file.txt

Result:

I do use that for my to-do-List.

Displaying system information on your Desktop

Code:

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType SPSoftwareDataType | perl -e ‘@info= <>; $info= join(“”, @info);if($info=~m@[\r\n]+\s*Computer Name:\s*([^\r\n]+)[\r\n]+@) {print “$1\n”;}if($info=~m@[\r\n]+\s*System Version:\s*([^\r\n]+)[\r\n]+@) {print “$1\n”;}if($info=~m@[\r\n]+\s*Memory:\s*([^\r\n]+)[\r\n]+@) {print “$1\n”;}if($info=~m@[\r\n]+\s*Total Number Of Cores:\s*([^\r\n]+)[\r\n]+@) {print “$1 x “;}if($info=~m@[\r\n]+\s*Processor Speed:\s*([^\r\n]+)[\r\n]+@) {print “$1 “;}if($info=~m@[\r\n]+\s*Processor Name:\s*([^\r\n]+)[\r\n]+@) {print “$1\n”;}’

Result:

Basically system_profiler is a perfect command for Geektool as it is almost almighty if it comes to system informations. So consider taking a look on the man page:

This hint is based on a hint on macosxhints.

More …

• AppleScript to display new mails on your Desktop
• Shell script for Mail & NetNewsWire
• Shell script for iTunes
• More examples
• And a very good collection of several scripts

Tags: cal, comic, df, display on desktop, geektool