Can't get conky-cli and bash scripts to both display in dwm statusbar!

Question

I'm trying to configure my dwm status bar to display some simple information using conky-cli and bash scripts. At first I tried just letting conky run the bash scripts (for network and volume state), but this increased my cpu usage by about 5%, which is significant considering I normally have 1-3% usage when idle. Also, I wanted to keep conky because it makes the display of certain information easy, such as cpu & RAM usage.
The problem is I'm having trouble getting both to display side by side. Here are the relevant parts of my .xinitrc:
network(){
iwconfig wlan0 2>&1 | grep -q no\ wireless\ extensions\. && {
echo wired
exit 0
essid=`iwconfig wlan0 | awk -F '"' '/ESSID/ {print $2}'`
stngth=`iwconfig wlan0 | awk -F '=' '/Quality/ {print $2}' | cut -d '/' -f 1`
bars=`expr $stngth / 10`
case $bars in
0) bar='[-------]' ;;
1) bar='[#------]' ;;
2) bar='[##-----]' ;;
3) bar='[###----]' ;;
4) bar='[####---]' ;;
5) bar='[#####--]' ;;
6) bar='[######-]' ;;
7) bar='[#######]' ;;
*) bar='[--!!!--]' ;;
esac
echo $essid$bar
exit 0
volume(){
vol=$(amixer get Master | awk -F'[]%[]' '/%/ {if ($7 == "off") { print "MM" } else { print $2 }}' | head -n 1)
echo Vol: $vol%
exit 0
conky | while true; read line; do xsetroot -name "`$line` `volume` `network` `date '+%a %m-%d-%Y %I:%M%p'`"; done &
exec dwm
(let me know if it would help to post any other files)
For some reason when I run this I only get the network/volume scripts and date running, updating every second (I think). The conky line just doesn't show up. I don't know what could be wrong, since I didn't see any error messages.
An even better solution would be to just have shell scripts to display CPU and MEM usage. I have a dual-core cpu, cpu0 and cpu1. I'd like to see both percentages if possible, or at least a percentage that is an accurate average of the two or something. In conky-cli I have something that shows:
cpu0/1: xx% xx%
Also, seeing RAM usage would help a lot. In conky it shows:
mem: xx% (xxxMB)
These are the ways I would like to have bash scripts show them, if possible, but I have zero skill in bash programming. I made this an option in case it's easier/cleaner/less resource hungry than a conky solution. Personally, if they're about the same in these aspects, I would prefer something with conky and the shell scripts because conky is so extensible, yet it's only flaw is executing scripts with minimal resource usage.
Help?

Answer 1

Thanks. I was thinking of using load average to save a few characters, but I didn't quite understand the numbers. I'll try that once I get to my Linux box, but could you please explain or post a link to something that explains load average (what's low, high, normal, etc.)?
EDIT: I found a website that explains loadavg. I now have my dwm status bar displaying it perfectly (yay!). Now I just need to add a few more things like battery status, etc. and I might be done. I'll probably post here if I have more questions, though.
Thanks for your help!
Last edited by Allamgir (2009-07-18 14:41:11)