battery-check

battery-check is a short bash script to check the power (battery) status reported by ACPI (Advanced configuration and Power Interface). If the power level is below a configurable threshold, log the power level and time, and optionally send an email. Not ready for prime time, but I think it works.

Dependencies

• ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface)
  • Probably a "sudo apt-get install acpi" away
• awk (gawk) an interpreted language for text processing often used for data extraction and reporting
  • Probably already installed, but if not, "sudo apt-get install gawk"
• send mail capabilities
  • If you don't already have, try this setup of msmtp
• dc commandline calculator
  • Probably already installed, but if not, you can find it in xxx package

Quick start

• Download the source: git clone https://github.com/jmcbri/battery-check

• Open and edit the battery-check file to match your needs. Specifically, the top has configuration information, and you'll need also to decide whether to have the email address embedded in the file or in a seperate file. (See comments in file)

• Save the file somewhere

• Since we are going to have it run as a system cron job, maybe change ownership to root (sudo chown root:root /path/to/file/battery-check)

• Set the file as executable only by root(chmod 700 /path/to/file/battery-check)

• Add the checking as a cron job
  Add lines to your cron file (there's lots of tutorials, but they're too complicated)
  sudo gedit /etc/crontab
  */5 * * * * root /home/jim/bin/battery-check/battery-check

  Make sure there's a return (CRLF at the end)

Bugs and feature requests

Please open a new issues. Before opening an issue, please search existing issues.

Copyright and license

Copyright 2013 James J. McBride, GPL 2