Skip to content

uptime Command Cheat Sheet

uptime gives a one line display of the following information: - Current time - How long the system has been running - How many users are currently logged on - The system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

Synopsis

uptime [options]

Basic Output

uptime
# Output:
# 10:30:15 up 45 days, 2:10, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.01

Decoding Load Average

  • 0.05 (1 min): Average number of processes waiting for CPU time over the last minute.
  • 0.02 (5 min): Over last 5 minutes.
  • 0.01 (15 min): Over last 15 minutes.

Rule of thumb: If the load average is higher than your CPU core count (e.g., Load 4.0 on a 2-core machine), the system is overloaded.

Options

Pretty Format (-p)

Show up time in a human-readable format.

uptime -p
# Output: up 6 weeks, 3 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes

System Up Since (-s)

Show the exact date/time the system booted.

uptime -s
# Output: 2025-01-01 08:20:15
  • /proc/loadavg: Raw load average data.
  • /proc/uptime: Raw uptime (seconds).
cat /proc/uptime
# 3904561.12 15309002.44
# (uptime seconds) (total idle seconds across all cores)