CLI System

ed system

ed system reports on the Mac you are typing on: a live CPU, memory, load and network sample, and the volumes that are mounted. It reads the machine directly through sysctl, the Mach host statistics, /bin/ps and pmset, so nothing here talks to the Edith app and nothing here needs it running. Reach for it when you want the numbers the app's This Mac view shows without opening a window, or when you want them on stdout as JSON.

It is the local half of a pair. ed machines metrics <machine> is the same report for a machine over SSH, in the same shape, so a script can treat both the same way.

At a glance

Command	What it does
ed system stats	Samples CPU, memory, load, uptime, network and optionally the top processes. Streams with --follow. Runs when you type ed system with no subcommand.
ed system disks	Lists mounted volumes, plus battery, temperature, fan, platform profile and GPU fields in JSON.

Commands

• ed system stats
• ed system disks

Exit codes

Code	When
0	The sample or the volume list was printed. --help and --version also exit 0.
2	--interval was zero, negative or not finite; --processes was negative; or the command line was wrong in the ordinary way, an unknown flag, a missing value, or a value that is not a number.

Neither command looks anything up by name and neither talks to the app, so 3 and 4 cannot happen here. Code 1 is the catch-all for an unexpected error escaping ed system stats, and nothing on the local sampling path throws one.

Notes and gotchas

• ed system with no subcommand is ed system stats. stats is declared as the group's default subcommand, so the two are the same invocation.
• Sizes are formatted with decimal units. KB is 1000 bytes, MB is 1000 KB, and so on, which is why a volume of 482797652 KB prints as 494 GB rather than 460 GB and 25165824 KB of memory prints as 25.8 GB. The JSON is raw kilobytes, so do your own maths there if you want binary units.
• At most 30 processes exist to be reported. The sampler keeps the top 30 by CPU, so --processes 50 gives you 30 rows and no warning.
• cpuPercent in the process rows comes from ps and is summed across cores, so a busy process reads above 100. cpu.totalPercent for the machine is capped at 100 across all cores. The two are not on the same scale.
• The process list is /bin/ps -axo pid=,user=,%cpu=,%mem=,rss=,comm= sorted by CPU descending, and name is the last path component of command.
• Network counters skip lo0 entirely, and an interface that moved no bytes during the window is left out of interfaces rather than listed at zero. The rxBps and txBps totals exclude interfaces judged virtual, which is anything named utun*, awdl*, llw*, bridge*, ap*, gif*, stf* or anpi*; those interfaces still appear in the list, with virtual: true.
• disk.readBps, disk.writeBps and disk.devices, along with cpu.stealPercent and tasks.runnable, are part of the shared sample shape and are always zero or empty for this Mac. They are filled in by the collector ed machines metrics runs on a Linux machine.
• tasks.total is the number of processes ps returned, so it counts every process on the machine and not just the ones --processes shows.
• --json --follow writes one compact document per line, forever, and repeats the whole host object on every line. That is deliberate: each line stands alone, so jq -c, head and a pipe into another process all work without buffering a document that never ends. Without --follow you get a single pretty-printed document instead.
• Object keys are sorted, in both the pretty and the compact form, so two runs diff cleanly.
• stats is the same LocalMachineSampler the app drives for its This Mac session, so the CLI and the window cannot disagree about a number. The window samples every two seconds and refreshes its volume and battery half on every fifteenth tick, about every thirty seconds; ed system disks reads it fresh on every call.
• The systemStats extension, the CPU and memory readout in the menu bar, is unrelated to these commands. ed system never consults it, and both commands work with every extension turned off.

Where to go next

• ed machines for the same sample taken on another machine over SSH, including the disk, steal and task fields this page reports as zero.
• ed cleaner for acting on what ed system disks tells you about free space.
• ed extensions for the menu bar CPU and memory readout.
• The ed command line for the rest of the reference.