How can I find out the total physical memory (RAM) of my linux box suitable to be parsed by a shell script?

Question

I\'m typing a shell script to find out the total physical memory in some RHEL linux boxes.

First of all I want to stress that I\'m interested in the total ph

Answer 1

Have you tried cat /proc/meminfo? You can then awk or grep out what you want, MemTotal e.g.

awk '/MemTotal/ {print $2}' /proc/meminfo

or

cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal

Answer 2

I know this question was asked a long time ago, but I wanted to provide another way to do this that I found useful for an issue I just worked on:

lshw -c memory

lshw

lshw is a small tool to extract detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 or IA-64 systems and on some PowerPC machines (PowerMac G4 is known to work).

Answer 3

Total online memory

Calculate the total online memory using the sys-fs.

totalmem=0;
for mem in /sys/devices/system/memory/memory*; do
  [[ "$(cat ${mem}/online)" == "1" ]] \
    && totalmem=$((totalmem+$((0x$(cat /sys/devices/system/memory/block_size_bytes)))));
done

#one-line code
totalmem=0; for mem in /sys/devices/system/memory/memory*; do [[ "$(cat ${mem}/online)" == "1" ]] && totalmem=$((totalmem+$((0x$(cat /sys/devices/system/memory/block_size_bytes))))); done

echo ${totalmem} bytes
echo $((totalmem/1024**3)) GB

Example output for 4 GB system:

4294967296 bytes
4 GB

Explanation

/sys/devices/system/memory/block_size_bytes

Number of bytes in a memory block (hex value). Using 0x in front of the value makes sure it's properly handled during the calculation.

/sys/devices/system/memory/memory*

Iterating over all available memory blocks to verify they are online and add the calculated block size to totalmem if they are.

[[ "$(cat ${mem}/online)" == "1" ]] &&

You can change or remove this if you prefer another memory state.

Answer 4

In Linux Kernel, present pages are physical pages of RAM which kernel can see. Literally, present pages is total size of RAM in 4KB unit.

grep present /proc/zoneinfo | awk '{sum+=$2}END{print sum*4,"KB"}'

The 'MemTotal' form /proc/meminfo is the total size of memory managed by buddy system.And we can also compute it like this:

grep managed /proc/zoneinfo | awk '{sum+=$2}END{print sum*4,"KB"}'

Answer 5

cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal or free gives you the exact amount of RAM your server has. This is not "available memory".

I guess your issue comes up when you have a VM and you would like to calculate the full amount of memory hosted by the hypervisor but you will have to log into the hypervisor in that case.

cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal

is equivalent to

 getconf -a | grep PAGES | awk 'BEGIN {total = 1} {if (NR == 1 || NR == 3) total *=$NF} END {print total / 1024" kB"}'

Answer 6

Total memory in Mb:

x=$(awk '/MemTotal/ {print $2}' /proc/meminfo)
echo $((x/1024))

or:

x=$(awk '/MemTotal/ {print $2}' /proc/meminfo) ; echo $((x/1024))