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Port of the week: bwm-ng

Written by Solène, on 06 May 2016.
Tags: #portoftheweek #networking

Comments on Fediverse/Mastodon

I am starting a periodic posting for something I wanted to do since a long time. Take a port in the tree and introduce it quickly. There are tons of ports in the tree that we don’t know about. So, I will write frequently about ports that I use frequently and that I find useful, if you read this, maybe I will find a new tool to your collection of “useful program”. :-)

For a first one, I would like to present net/bwm-ng. Its name stands for “BandWitch Monitor next-generation”, it allows the user to watch in real-time the bandwith usage of the different network interfaces. By default, it will update the display every 0.5 second. You can change the frequency of updating by pressing keys ‘+’ and ‘-’.

Let see the bindings of the interactive mode :

  • ‘t’ will cycle between current rate, maximum peak, sum, average on 30 seconds.
  • ‘n’ will cycle between data sources, on OpenBSD it defaults to “getifaddrs” and you can also choose “sysctl” or “netstat -i”.
  • ‘d’ will change the unit, by default it shows KB but you can change to another units that suits better your current data.

Summary output after downloading a file

bwm-ng v0.6.1 (probing every 5.700s), press 'h' for help
input: getifaddrs type: sum
-         iface                   Rx                   Tx                Total
==============================================================================
            lo0:           0.00  B              0.00  B              0.00  B
            em0:          19.89 MB            662.82 KB             20.54 MB
         pflog0:           0.00  B              0.00  B              0.00  B
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          total:          19.89 MB            662.82 KB             20.54 MB

It’s available on *BSD, Linux and maybe others.

In OpenBSD ports tree, look for net/bwm-ng.