Test Internet Speed in Command Line
Sometimes the Internet is sluggish and you need to find out if your connection is the culprit. The usual routine to find out the connection speed is the following. First, switch to your browser. Then type out the address of one of the speed testing sites. Finally, navigate through, usually bloated and annoying, GUI. For those who cannot be bothered to do that (and are on *nix system), I have a simple trick to test internet speed in command line. You can just create an alias called speedtest
. If you use bash, then running this command will do:
$ echo "alias speedtest='wget https://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null'" >> .bash_aliases
However, my personal favorite is fish (the shell, not the animal). In fish, you can make custom function in ~/.config/fish/functions/speedtest.fish
. The code is below:
function speedtest --description "Test the network speed" if test "$argv" = "10" wget -O /dev/null https://cachefly.cachefly.net/10mb.test else wget -O /dev/null https://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test end end
In order to measure your connection speed, just type speedtest
in the command line:
$ speedtest 100mb.test 100%[=====================================>] 100.00M 3.56MB/s Time 25s
Wget and bash are usually installed by default, so you should have no trouble running the alias. As for slower connections, use 10mb.test
instead of 100mb.test
. You can find more useful tricks in the command-line category. Also check my Gitlab page.