Port of the week: bwm-ng

Author: Solène

Date: 06 May 2016

Tags: portoftheweek networking

NILI 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**.