How to Check Battery Capacity & Cycle Count from Command Line on Mac

Most Mac users will likely see battery stats in the menu bar of MacOS, and head to System Information to investigate cycle count, but some users who spend a lot of time at the command line may find it useful to be able to retrieve battery information from the Terminal.

One way to find battery life information is with the pmset command, but another approach uses the ioreg command, which is what we’ll cover here. By using ioreg, we will retrieve the current battery capacity, maximum battery capacity, and the cycle count of the battery on the Mac as well.

How to Get Battery Capacity & Cycle Count from Mac Command Line

From the Terminal, enter the following command string:

ioreg -l| grep -e "CurrentCapacity" -e "MaxCapacity" -e "CycleCount"

You will see something like this reported back:

"CurrentCapacity" = 97
"MaxCapacity" = 100
"CycleCount" = 54

Where, CurrentCapacity is the current battery charge, MaxCapacity is the maximum battery capacity, and CycleCount is the number of cycles the battery has up until this point.

Again, there are other ways to get battery information on the Mac, including using the GUI which is much more user friendly to the average Mac user, and the pmset command approach is maybe easier too, but it’s helpful to have more than one approach.