How to Read CPU Temperature Sensor on Linux Comandline

You can use Linux hardware monitoring tool such as lm_sensor. This tool provides some essential tools for monitoring the hardware health of Linux systems containing hardware health monitoring hardware such as the LM78, and LM75.

This tool use the System Management Bus (SMBus or SMB), which is a simple two-wire bus, derived from I²C and used for communication with low-bandwidth devices on a motherboard, especially power related chips such as a laptop’s rechargeable battery subsystem. Other devices might include temperature, fan, or voltage sensors; and lid switches. PCI add-in cards may connect to an SMBus segment.

Install lm_sensors / lm-sensors package

This package may or may not be installed. Type the following command to install software on CentOS / RHEL / Fedora Linux:

# yum install lm_sensors

If you are using Debian / Ubuntu Linux, enter:

$ sudo apt-get install lm-sensors

Configure lm_sensors

To detect hardware monitoring chips, type the following command as the root user:

# sensors-detect

OR

$ sudo sensors-detect

Sample output:

This is an interactive program that will walk you through the process of scanning your system for various hardware monitoring chips, or sensors, supported by libsensors, or more generally by the lm_sensors tool suite. For my system coretemp and i2c-i801 driver need to loaded in order to see sensors data. Type ‘YES” to update /etc/modules files. Now you need to reboot the box. Alternatively, you can load all drivers using modprobe command

# modprobe coretemp

# modprobe i2c-i801

How do I read sensors chip data such as temperature?

Type the following command at shell prompt:

$ sensors

Sample output:

Here is another output from Intel xeon server box: