problem running TOP command through PHP

Anon

Hi all, hope someone can help me out. I am trying to run the 'top' command in text mode through PHP script.

The idea is to keep a log of the CPU usage every 30 minutes. However, I have tried all the following command:

/usr/bin/top -b -n2 -d5 | grep CPU\ states | tail -1

with exec(), popen()and passthru(). All of them gave the same error message:

"top: tcgetattr() failed: Invalid argument

Could someone give me some suggestion? thanks.

-Will

brandonschnell

this will return the cpu states line:
"/usr/bin/top -b -n2 -d5 | grep "CPU states" | tail -1"

or try:

passthru("uptime | awk -F' ' '{print $12}'");

which will return just the % of cpu usage over the last 15 minutes

Anon

Hi, thanks for replying. Here is the weird thing. If i execute this PHP script in a terminal box as root, it runs perfect fine.
However, if its setup to run by crontab, it gives that error.

Thanks for the suggestion on uptime. It doesn't seem to be working on my server, it just says 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 every time when I execute uptime.

The top command is more what I need, cause it gives the cpu load by user, system, nice and idle.

brandonschnell

the error you refer to means something is trying to access the terminal ("man tcgetattr")

the following code worked for me from crontab and left a test_results file with one cpu states line

######################################################
#!/usr/local/bin/php

<?
$cmd = /usr/bin/top -b -n1 | grep "CPU states";

$fp = fopen("test_results","w");
fwrite($fp,$cmd);
fclose($fp);
?>