How can I get the current network interface throughput statistics on Linux/UNIX?

davidmytton picture davidmytton · Feb 27, 2009 · Viewed 308.3k times · Source

Tools such as MRTG provide network throughput / bandwidth graphs for the current network utilisation on specific interfaces, such as eth0. How can I return that information at the command line on Linux/UNIX?

Preferably this would be without installing anything other than what is available on the system as standard.

Answer

Philip Durbin picture Philip Durbin · Mar 23, 2009

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage -- http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/

I don't know how "standard" iftop is, but I was able to install it with yum install iftop on Fedora.