How to obtain the number of CPUs/cores in Linux from the command line?

lscpu gathers CPU architecture information form /proc/cpuinfon in human-read-able format:

# lscpu


Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                8
On-line CPU(s) list:   0-7
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    4
CPU socket(s):         2
NUMA node(s):          1
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
CPU family:            6
Model:                 15
Stepping:              7
CPU MHz:               1866.669
BogoMIPS:              3732.83
Virtualization:        VT-x
L1d cache:             32K
L1i cache:             32K
L2 cache:              4096K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-7

See also https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/468766/understanding-output-of-lscpu.

Here's the way I use for counting the number of physical cores that are online on Linux:

lscpu --online --parse=Core,Socket | grep --invert-match '^#' | sort --unique | wc --lines

or in short:

lscpu -b -p=Core,Socket | grep -v '^#' | sort -u | wc -l

Example (1 socket):

> lscpu
...
CPU(s):                28
Thread(s) per core:    2
Core(s) per socket:    14
Socket(s):             1
....
> lscpu -b -p=Core,Socket | grep -v '^#' | sort -u | wc -l
14

Example (2 sockets):

> lscpu
...
CPU(s):                56
Thread(s) per core:    2
Core(s) per socket:    14
Socket(s):             2
...
> lscpu -b -p=Core,Socket | grep -v '^#' | sort -u | wc -l
28

Example (4 sockets):

> lscpu
...
CPU(s):                64
Thread(s) per core:    2
Core(s) per socket:    8
Socket(s):             4
...
> lscpu -b -p=Core,Socket | grep -v '^#' | sort -u | wc -l
32

If you want to do this so it works on linux and OS X, you can do:

CORES=$(grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo 2>/dev/null || sysctl -n hw.ncpu)

It is very simple. Just use this command:

lscpu

The above answers are applicable to most situations, but if you are in a docker container environment and your container is limited by CpusetCpus, then you can't actually get the real cpu cores through the above method.

In this case, you need do this to get the real cpu cores:

grep -c 'cpu[0-9]' /proc/stat

I also thought cat /proc/cpuinfo would give me the correct answer, however I recently saw that my ARM quad core Cortex A53 system only showed a single core. It seems that /proc/cpuinfo only shows the active cores, whereas:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/present

is a better measure of what's there. You can also

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/online

to see which cores are online, and

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/offline

to see which cores are offline. The online, offline, and present sysfs entries return the index of the CPUS, so a return value of 0 just means core 0, whereas a return value of 1-3 means cores 1,2, and 3.

See https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-devices-system-cpu

In case anybody was wondering, here is what the Python psutil.cpu_count(logical=False) call does on Linux in equivalent shell script:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-9]*/topology/core_cpus_list | sort -u | wc -l

And here’s a slightly longer version that falls back to the information from the deprecated thread_siblings_list file if core_cpus_list isn’t available (psutil has this fallback):

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-9]*/topology/{core_cpus_list,thread_siblings_list} | sort -u | wc -l

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor

This worked fine. When I tried the first answer I got 3 CPU's as the output. I know that I have 4 CPUs on the system so I just did a grep for processor and the output looked like this:

[root@theservername ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor
processor       : 0
processor       : 1
processor       : 2
processor       : 3

If it's okay that you can use Python, then numexpr module has a function for this:

In [5]: import numexpr as ne

In [6]: ne.detect_number_of_cores()
Out[6]: 8

also this:

In [7]: ne.ncores
Out[7]: 8

To query this information from the command prompt use:

# runs whatever valid Python code given as a string with `-c` option
$ python -c "import numexpr as ne; print(ne.ncores)"
8

Or simply it is possible to get this info from multiprocessing.cpu_count() function

$ python -c "import multiprocessing; print(multiprocessing.cpu_count())"

Or even more simply use os.cpu_count()

$ python -c "import os; print(os.cpu_count())"

If you just want to count physical cores, this command did it for me.

lscpu -e | tail -n +2 | tr -s " " | cut -d " " -f 4 | sort | uniq | wc -w

Pretty basic, but seems to count actual physical cores, ignoring the logical count

Use below query to get core details

[oracle@orahost](TESTDB)$ grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo
8

Fravadona's answer is awesome and correct, but it requires the presence of lscpu. Since it is not present on the system where I need the number of physical cores, I tried to come up with one that relies only on proc/cpuinfo

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -B2 'core id' | sed 's/siblings.*/'/ | tr -d '[:space:]' | sed 's/--/\n/'g | sort -u | wc -l

It works perfectly, but unfortunately it isn't as robust as Fravadona's, since it will break if

• the name or order of the fields inside /proc/cpuinfo changes
• grep replaces the line separator it inserts (currently --) by some other string.

BUT, other than that, it works flawlessly :)

Here is a quick explanation of everything that is happening

grep -B2 'core id'

get only the lines we are interested (i.e "core id" and the 2 preceding lines)

sed 's/siblings.*/'/

remove the "siblings..." line

tr -d '[:space:]'

replace spacing chars

sed 's/--/\n/'g

replace the '--' char, which was inserted by grep, by a line break

sort -u

group by "physical id,core id"

wc -l

count the number of lines

Being a total noobie, I was very pleased with myself when this worked. I never thought I would be able to join the required lines together to group by "physical id" and "core id". It is kind of hacky, but works.

If any guru knows a way to simplify this mess, please let me know.

Most answers in this thread pertain to logical cores.

Using BaSH on Ubuntu 18.x, I find this works well to determine number of physical CPUs:

numcpu="$(lscpu | grep -i 'socket(s)' | awk '{print $(2)}')"

It should work on most Linux distros.

One more answer among the numerous previous ones. It is possible to use the cgroups when they are available. The cpuset sub-system provides the list of actives cpus. This can be listed in the top most cgroup of the hierarchy in /sys/fs/cgroup. For example:

$ cat /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset/cpuset.effective_cpus
0-3

Then, a parsing of the latter would be necessary to get the number of active CPUs. The content of this file is a comma separated list of CPU sets.

Here is an example using tr to break the list into single expressions and using sed to translate the intervals into arithmetic operations passed to expr:

#!/bin/sh

# For test purposes, the CPU sets are passed as parameters
#cpuset=`cat /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset/cpuset.effective_cpus`
cpuset=$1

ncpu=0
for e in `echo $cpuset | tr ',' ' '`
do
  case $e in

    # CPU interval ==> Make an arithmetic operation
    *-*) op=`echo $e | sed -E 's/([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)/\2 - \1 + 1/'`;;

    # Single CPU number
    *) op=1;;

  esac

  ncpu=`expr $ncpu + $op`

done

echo $ncpu

Here are some examples of executions with several flavors of CPU sets:

$ for cpuset in "0" "0,3" "0-3" "0-3,67" "0-3,67,70-75" "0,1-3,67,70-75"
> do
>   ncpu.sh $cpuset
> done
1
2
4
5
11
11

 dmidecode  | grep -i cpu | grep Version

gives me

Version: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v4 @ 3.20GHz

Version: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v4 @ 3.20GHz

Which is correct socket count - looking up the E5-2667 tells me each socket has 8 cores, so multiply and end up with 16 cores across 2 sockets.

Where lscpu give me 20 CPUs - which is totally incorrect - not sure why. (same goes for cat /proc/cpu - ends up with 20.

Python 3 also provide a few simple ways to get it:

$ python3 -c "import os; print(os.cpu_count());"

4

$ python3 -c "import multiprocessing; print(multiprocessing.cpu_count())"

4

Summary: to get physical CPUs do this:

grep 'core id' /proc/cpuinfo | sort -u

to get physical and logical CPUs do this:

grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo

/proc << this is the golden source of any info you need about processes and

/proc/cpuinfo << is the golden source of any CPU information.