Because there are so many sites out there that try and teach Bash scripting and how to do all the stuff inside it, I’m only going to continue from here by showing what each of my scripts looks like. The processes, network traffic and uptime scripts were borrowed in their original form from the Geeklets list on Mac OS X tips. Credit for those must go to the original authors. Here are the scripts:
date ‘+%H:%M’
CPU Usage:
top -l 1 | awk '/CPU usage/ {print "u:", $3, "s:", $5, "i:", $7}’
Day, date, temperature & humidity:
# day _day=`date +%a | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'` # degrees symbol: ˚ # get the temperature and humidity and write them to a temporary file ~/_Applications/lynx/lynx -dump http://www.bom.gov.au/vic/observations/melbourne.shtml | awk '/[36]Melbourne/ { print $3 }; /[36]Melbourne/ { print $6, "%"; };' > /tmp/weather-temp _temp=`sed -n 1p /tmp/weather-temp` _humidity=`sed -n 2p /tmp/weather-temp` # month _month=`date +%b` _date=`date +%d` # do some checks to make sure data returned for the checks that require an internet connection if [[ -z $_temp ]]; then _temp="-" fi if [[ -z $_humidity ]]; then _humidity="-" fi echo "$_dayttt`echo $_temp | tr -d " "` C" echo "$_month $_datet`echo $_humidity | tr -d " "` HUMIDITY" | tr '[:lower:]' ‘[:upper:]’
Disk space:
df -hl | grep 'disk0s2' | awk '{print "t:", $2, "f:", $4, "p:", $5; }'
Memory usage:
top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {print "u:", $8, "f:", $10}'
The "Start Teh Music …" widget you see next to the dock is created by Bowtie, definitely the best iTunes notification/info widget app out there. It will change to show the title and artist of the track that’s currently playing, once one starts. I’ve got the Aussie V8 Supercars on the T.V. right now … no music needed. 🙂
Here’s the same desktop again, this time labelled so that you know where each script is (click for larger version).

Granted, my choice of system info, fonts, colours etc is fairly boring and minimal compared to some but they give me what I need without destroying what I reckon is one of the best desktop background images I’ve ever found.