show bytes received, how much have I downloaded?

[hachel]

hi

how can I see how much bytes have been received during the active session?
I've seen conky do it and apparently it just uses available information provided by the system.

thanks

[Brandon Williams]

You can do this with ifconfig. Here's some sample output:

$ ifconfig eth1
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:21:63:bf:ef:89
inet addr:192.168.1.28 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::221:63ff:febf:ef89/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:16804 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:37526
TX packets:8411 errors:6 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:9315972 (9.3 MB) TX bytes:1348303 (1.3 MB)
Interrupt:17
The info is available in a way that's easier to parse but not as readable in /proc/net/dev:

$ cat /proc/net/dev
Inter-| Receive | Transmit
face |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
lo: 115295 897 0 0 0 0 0 0 115295 897 0 0 0 0 0 0
eth0: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
eth1: 9347221 17192 0 0 0 38355 0 0 1356142 8464 6 0 0 0 0 0