cpuid_tool(3)

πŸ’– NAME πŸ’–

cpuid_tool β€” bestie, this is the command line interface to libcpuid. That's it, that's the whole name, and yes you've landed in the Library Functions Manual, section 3, so come on in and take your shoes off 🫢


🌸 Date

2008-11-19 β€” a classic, honestly. Vintage. Iconic.

🌸 Author

Veselin Georgiev πŸ‘‘ the actual main character who built this thing.


✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

Okay so. This file is a direct interface to libcpuid, periodt. If you want the short reference of command line options, go peek at the usage() function, or just be lazy like the rest of us and run the program with the --help switch πŸ’…

This file has several purposes, and we're listing all of them because none of them are skippable:

  1. When you start it with no arguments, it dumps the RAW and decoded CPU data into files β€” raw.txt and report.txt respectively. The vibe here is dumb, doubleclicky tool for non-developer users, so they can hand debug info about unrecognized processors over to the libcpuid developers. No terminal skills required, no cap πŸŽ€
  2. When you drive it from the terminal with the --report option, it becomes a generic CPU-info utility. Very "look at me, I'm useful" energy 🌈
  3. It can be used inside shell scripts β€” like, to grab the name of the CPU, cache sizes, features β€” using query options such as --cache, --brandstr, etc. Shell script girlies, this one's for you πŸ¦‹
  4. And finally? It serves to self-document libcpiud itself :) β€” yes, the original spells it that way, and we are respectfully keeping every character, even that one 😭 (love that for us, honestly).

πŸ’€ Quick vibe check before you go: no arguments means it writes files (raw.txt and report.txt) instead of printing to your terminal. That's the intended doubleclicky behaviour, not a bug. Set expectations accordingly, bestie.

And that's the whole page, bestie β€” no filler, no skipped options, every fact kept exactly where it was. This was libcpuid, Version 0.8.2, dated 2008-11-19, and it ate. πŸ’…βœ¨

πŸ“¦ where this page comes from