John's Blog

Monitoring Bluetooth Data Usage

So I have a Cingular data plan on my phone that lets my Powerbook get internet access from anywhere. Problem is, I'm only allowed 5 mb of data a month before I incur extra charges. Thus, being able to know how many bytes I've used is important. And clearly, I'm not the only one with this issue, so I was *amazed* versiontracker didn't already have an app to do this. Then tonight, when I was on the train (via my phone) I mentioned this issue to Pat, at which point he suggested I look to see if the ppp log in /var/log/ has this data. And he was right - it does! So I whipped up a little unix command line magic to make the log data useful. It looks like this:

[DuffyPB867:/var/log] johnh% zgrep Sent ppp.log* | awk '{print $8,$11}' | awk '{ sent += $1; rcv +=$2; tot=sent+rcv;} END { print "bytes sent: " sent; print "bytes received: " rcv; print "Total bytes: " tot;}'

And returns output that looks like this:

bytes sent: 1376042
bytes received: 8413310
Total bytes: 9789352

Now I just need to figure out how to use the date command to make it only look at the last month. That issue is certainly fixable. The only other problem I see isn't so simple - the OSX only writes data use to the log file when you disconnect. This means there is no way I can see to trigger a warning when you are close to but under your limit.

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