In the last article I wrote, I explained how to use ‘lshw’ to get information about your hardware from the terminal. This article will show you how to gather CPU information from the terminal.
This will be yet another quick article, but again this is a valuable tool to do hardware diagnostics when you don’t have other tools available.
Just like last time, the command is self-evident once you really look at it. The command is ‘lscpu‘ and it does what you’d expect – ‘list CPU information’. It is defined as thus in the manual:
lscpu – display information about the CPU architecture
So, let’s give it a shot. Crack open your default terminal emulator by pressing
And, there you have some fairly easy to understand. It’s often used as a quick way to tell if your CPU supports 64 bit instructions. You’ll see something like this if it does:
NOTE: Pretty much all modern computer hardware supports the 64 bit instruction set, but there are still some 32 bit machines out there and being used.
Unlike the ‘lshw’ command, this one doesn’t need to be run as an administrator. It runs as a regular user just fine and running it as an admin doesn’t get you any more information.
Also unlike the ‘lshw’ command, there isn’t any other way to run it that’s all that interesting. You can read the man page, but you’ll seldom need to use this in any other way other than the way described here. Just type the command, get the information, and move on with whatever it was you were doing!
See? I told you this one would be another quick and easy article. Thanks for reading and don’t be scared of signing up to the newsletter. It’s not like you’ll be inundated with piles of unwanted email! You’ll just get notified when there’s a new article and I promise to not sell your email address to anyone.
