speedometer(1)

📦
version 2.9 · 4 versions
, in ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 speedometer(1) — like, the whole vibe 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this one? this is the speedometer page from User Commands and it's genuinely iconic for anyone who's ever sat there staring at a file transfer like 👁️👄👁️ wondering is it done yet. it measures and displays the rate of data across a network connection. no cap. periodt.

✨ NAME ✨

speedometer — measure and display the rate of data across a network connection 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

speedometer [options] tap [[-c] tap] ...

👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

monitor network traffic, or watch the speed / progress of a file transfer. it's giving "main character energy" for your terminal, fr fr.

⚠️ heads up: you gotta give it at least one tap option — -f, -rx, or -tx — or it's literally not gonna do anything for you. and the -c option starts a new column; without it, your taps just get piled vertically on top of each other like a very sad little stack. 😭

also, bestie, pro tip from the manpage itself: before you run this, start generating some traffic first. transfer files in and out, e.g. with scp(1), over the network you're measuring. otherwise there's nothing to measure and you'll be staring at a big fat zero, which is not the vibe. 💀

💅 OPTIONS 💅

one bullet per flag, gonna give you all of them, no skipping, i don't play like that:

  • -b — use the old blocky display instead of the smoothed one, even when UTF-8 encoding is detected. retro-coded, lowkey charming. ✨
  • -f filename [size] — show download speed with a progress bar. 🫶 important: you must use this if it directly follows another file tap that didn't have an expected size specified. don't skip it or things get weird.
  • -i interval — the interval, in seconds. examples: 5 or 0.25. default is 1. yes, you can do fractions, she's precise like that. ⏱️
  • -p — use plain-text display. note: this one's for one tap only. 🙈
  • -rx iface — display bytes received on a network interface. 🍓
  • -tx iface — display bytes transmitted on a network interface. 🚀
  • -z — report zero size on files that don't exist yet instead of waiting around for them to be created. no more waiting, we're manifesting. 💫

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

this is the part where it eats, honestly. every single one, here we go:

how long will it take for my 38MB transfer to finish? 🥺

speedometer favorite_episode.rm $(( 38 * 1024 * 1024 ))

how quickly is another transfer going?

speedometer dl/big.avi

how fast is this LAN? 🌐

host-a$ cat /dev/zero | nc -l -p 12345
host-b$ nc host-a 12345 > /dev/null
host-b$ speedometer -rx eth0

how fast is the upstream on this ADSL line?

speedometer -tx ppp0

how fast can I write data to my filesystem? (with at least 1GB free) 💾

dd bs=1000000 count=1000 if=/dev/zero of=bigfile &
speedometer bigfile

🧚 ENVIRONMENT 🧚

None. that's it. nothing. empty. she needs no environment, she's self-sufficient. 💜

🎀 FILES 🎀

None. again — none. zero files, we're clean, we're minimal, we're thriving. ✨

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

go hang out with the other cool kids in the process-monitoring friend group:

htop(1) iotop(1) scp(1) top(1) vmstat(1)

iykyk. 👑

🌸 AUTHORS 🌸

  • the program itself was written by Ian Ward <ian.ward@excess.org> 💖
  • this manual page was written by Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net>.
  • released under license GNU GPL version 2 or (at your option) any later version. for more info about the license, go visit <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>.

and that's the whole thing, bestie — sourced from speedometer version dated 2026-01-29, filed under speedometer(1), and this page? she ate. periodt. 💅✨🦋

📦 where this page comes from