I last wrote about GeekTool when I had an iTunes script and some process management output on my desktop. I have a few new scripts that I’ll highlight here.

tail -25 /var/log/system.log

The first script displays the last 25 lines of the system log. In Mac OS X 10.5, the system log rolls over at midnight every day, and this for some reason causes the built-in file display to malfunction. I am using tail to display the last 25 lines of the system log.

ps -ecm -O %cpu,%mem

This script shows the output of all currently running processes, sorted by memory usage.

• -e Displays processes from all users.
• -c Only displays the executable name, not the entire path to the excutable.
• -m Sorts the processes by memory usage.

• -O Designates the start of a list of comma-delimited options. %cpu displays CPU usage as a percentage. %mem displays memory usage as a percentage.

  cal

  sed “s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/ $(date +%e) / $(date +%e

  sed ‘s/./-/g’) /”

This command outputs a formatted display of the current month. The current date is replaced by the string “–” in order to visually differentiate it.

/path/to/script/iTunes-Now-Playing.pl | iconv -f utf-8 -t ucs-2-internal

This Perl script is something I wrote to display the currently playing track in iTunes. You can download the script here. The script contains a function that was derived from John Gruber’s article How to Determine if a Certain App Is Running Using AppleScript and Perl.

/usr/bin/curl -s http://rss.wunderground.com/auto/rss_full/VA/Blacksburg.xml?units=both | awk '/%3Ctitle%3ECurrent/ {printf "Temp: " $4 " | "; for (i = 8; i %3C 11; i++) if ($i != "-") printf $i " "; else break; printf "\n"}'

UPDATE: I now use a Python script that uses the Yahoo! Weather API to get weather data.

This bash script scrapes the Weather Underground feed for Blacksburg and displays the temperature and current conditions. It’s not as pretty as a Dashboard weather widget, but it takes up much less screen real estate. I have another instance of this command set up to scrape the Oak Ridge XML feed for when I’m back in Greensboro.

Each one of these scripts is set up to display for both my 20” Cinema Display and my MacBook screen; I have Home and Portable groups of commands set up in GeekTool. You can download GeekTool from Tynsoe’s website.