I wanted to view my up to date network usage in a easy to read and friendly way. So I built a tool that pulls the data in from netstat, and displays a cleaned up output in Cowsay.

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• Setup
• Usage
• License

The latest stable release is 0.3.0 Beta.

This is a Python tool that is presently only built for OSX. To render the output as seen above we use figlet and cowsay. To get started you will need homebrew to manage packages such as Python, figlet, and cowsay. To install please run the following command:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

Once homebrew is installed (or if you already have it) you can run the following command:

$ brew install cownet

$ cownet
                              _
  ___ _____      ___ __   ___| |_
 / __/ _ \ \ /\ / / '_ \ / _ \ __|
| (_| (_) \ V  V /| | | |  __/ |_
 \___\___/ \_/\_/ |_| |_|\___|\__|

 ___________________________________
< Received 173.9 MB / Sent 337.7 MB >
 -----------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

$ cownet -l
Received 2.4 GB / Sent 2.4 GB

$ cownet -h

usage: Cownet [-h] [-l] [-i INTERFACE] [-d DELAY] [-v]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -l, --light           The low calorie version
  -i INTERFACE, --interface INTERFACE
                        Change the network interface (defaults to en1)
  -d DELAY, --delay DELAY
                        Change the frequency we check your usage data
                        (defaults to 30 seconds)
  -v, --version         show program's version number and exit

This tool is protected by the GNU General Public License v2.

Copyright Jeffrey Hann 2013