How to discover number of *logical* cores on Mac OS X?

user_2624511 0
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How can you tell, from the command line, how many cores are on the machine when you're running Mac OS X? On Linux, I use:

x=$(awk '/^processor/ {++n} END {print n+1}' /proc/cpuinfo)

It's not perfect, but it's close. This is intended to get fed to make, which is why it gives a result 1 higher than the actual number. And I know the above code can be written denser in Perl or can be written using grep, wc, and cut, but I decided the above was a good tradeoff between conciseness and readability.

VERY LATE EDIT: Just to clarify: I'm asking how many logical cores are available, because this corresponds with how many simultaneous jobs I want make to spawn. jkp's answer, further refined by Chris Lloyd, was exactly what I needed. YMMV.

macos makefile
15 Answers

getconf works both in Mac OS X and Linux, just in case you need it to be compatible with both systems:

$ getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN
12
user_9608190

It wasn't specified in the original question (although I saw OP post in comments that this wasn't an option), but many developers on macOS have the Homebrew package manager installed.

For future developers who stumble upon this question, as long as the assumption (or requirement) of Homebrew being installed exists (e.g., in an engineering organization in a company), nproc is one of the common GNU binaries that is included in the coreutils package.

brew install coreutils

If you have scripts that you would prefer to write once (for Linux + macOS) instead of twice, or to avoid having if blocks where you need to detect the OS to know whether or not to call nproc vs sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu, this may be a better option.

user_2285140

This can be done in a more portable way:

$ nproc --all
32

Compatible with macOS and Linux.

user_2930640
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