Uptime on your hands

• Difficulty: Expert
• Application: Perl

In computing, wasted resources are resources that could be better spent helping you. Why not run a process that updates the titlebar of your terminal with the current load average in real-time, regardless of what else you're running?
Save this as a script called tl, and save it to your ~/bin directory:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
$|++;

my $host=`/bin/hostname`;
chomp $host;

while(1) {

open(LOAD,"/proc/loadavg") || die "Couldn't open /proc/loadavg: $!\n";

my @load=split(/ /,<LOAD>);
close(LOAD);


print "$host: $load[0] $load[1] $load[2] at ", scalar(localtime);
print "\007";

sleep 2;
}

When you'd like to have your titlebar replaced with the name, load average, and current time of the machine you're logged into, just run tl&. It will happily go on running in the background, even if you're running an interactive program like Vim.