One of our readers requested information on displaying Macbook hardware temperatures on their desktop using geektools. Below is a quick summary of what you need to do, unfortunatlly its not quite as simple as you’d hope.
First thing you need to do is install TemperatureMonitor from the following site http://www.bresink.com/osx/0TemperatureMonitor/download.php5. It will give you versions got for the full version and not the lite version. This program provides us with a command line tool we can use to get our temperatures.
Once installed open up a terminal and run:
cd /Applications/TemperatureMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS
Then run
./tempmonitor -c -a -l
This will give you a list of all your temperatures which should be similar to:
SMART Disk FUJITSU MHZ2120BH FFS G1 (K678T922BMUY): 39 C SMC CPU A DIODE: 51 C SMC ENCLOSURE BOTTOMSIDE: 33 C SMC NORTHBRIDGE POS 1: 48 C SMC NORTHBRIDGE POS G: 48 C
Now to display a particular temperature in geektools input the following line into your geektool widget.
cd /Applications/TemperatureMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS && ./tempmonitor -c -a -l | grep "BOTTOMSIDE" | perl -pe 's/.*://m'
you may need to change your path and the text after grep should match the seonsor temperature you are looking for.
8 bit scraps has been created by Graham Hadgraft a web developer from Ipswich. Graham Hadgraft has 10 Years programming experience in various languages.
Hey graham, thanks for coming up with this article! However it seems like when i open up Terminal and plug in those lines it gives me an error like
-bash: cd/Applications/TemperatureMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS: No such file or directory
Sorry, I’m a complete noob at coding. When you say run terminal, all i did was open up quicksilver and type in terminal. I hope that’s the correct terminal you meant!
oh and I’m using a brand new i7 15″ macbook pro running mac os 10.6.4
oh no matter, i got it to work, thanks! apparently didnt notice there was supposed to be a space after cd and before the /applications. as well as it be -C -A and -L not -1. good work though, thanks alot! would i have to open temperature monitor each time i start up tho?
You wont need to open up temperature monitor at startup. It does not need to be opened as the command we are running in the terminal is running the program it just has not graphical interface.
Where did you learn about this? Can you give me the reference?