Printing the value of RAM as a number is tricky but doable.
This example will print the amount of RAM installed in your machine.
4.4 Mon Mar 09 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ awk '/^MemTotal/{ print $2/1000 }' /proc/meminfo 12138.6 |
This is another example, I could not work out how to get the piped value as a variable, but this method is fine, using 0 decimal points.
4.4 Mon Mar 09 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ export mem=`grep "MemTotal" /proc/meminfo | sed 's/[^0-9]*//g'` ;echo "scale = 0; $mem / 1000" | bc -l 12138 |
This was actually pretty tricky to work out, but nice at the same time. It is very good to finally work something out like this. The second example creates a variable that contains the output of the first commands, then it can be fed into bc. This is a great way to handle tricky piping.
This is yet another example of the same trick.
4.4 Mon Mar 09 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ free | sed -n '2{p;q}' | awk '{print $2}' 12138648 |
The sed -n '2{p;q}' command prints only the second line of output, then the awk '{print $2}' command prints only the second column of text.
This is a very useful tip.
To print the amount of RAM in a whole number, you may do it like this.
┌──[jason@11000000.10101000.00000001.00000010]─[~] └──╼ ╼ $ free -h | gawk '/Mem:/{print $2}' | awk 'FNR == 1 {print $1 "B"}' 15GiB |