Terminal command for showing bandwidth

Question

Hallo,
is there a way to show my current internet or LAN bandwith in the terminal?
Thank you. Hannes

Answer 1

If you have another Mac, like at your work, and you can get through your work's firewalls and ssh to it, you could, from the keyboard,
scp localSourcefile ${Work}:destinationDirectory
to get an indication of your upload speed and
scp ${Work}:sourcefile localDestinationDirectory
to get an indication of your download speed (assuming your work's effective bandwidth was always going to be much greater than your home's bandwidth). Those commands will provide you an indication of actual throughput ("goodput") of your file transfer. Your file should be a "respectable" size, though, so as to get a decent average value.
I am not aware of any single command that will just tell you throughput. Seems like you'd have to be transferring a file to obtain that information, e.g., with scp.
For use in a bash shell script, I played around with trying to do an scp and piping it to awk (e.g.,
thruput=`scp localSourcefile ${Work}:destinationDirectory | awk '{ print $4 }'` && echo $thruput but I couldn't get it to work. That is something that you might try experimenting with on your own, though. Plus, you would have had to set up passwordless ssh with DSA public key exchange in order to make it a "hands-off" shell script.