Get cpu usage per core on the command line

Question

Activity monitor allows users to see the cpu usage on a per-core basis (for multicore machines, e.g. my MacBook Pro). Is there a way to find the percent usage of each core/processor via the command line?

Answer 1

I've installed htop for this purpose. In order to install on OS X (10.8.4), I used homebrew, which installed the htop package (brew install htop).

Despite the fact that this is via the command line, it is still a graphical output within the terminal.

Answer 2

To install htop on OS X El Capitan follow these easy steps: Copy and paste the following commands into a terminal window:

curl -O http://themainframe.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/htop.zip
unzip htop.zip
sudo mv htop /usr/local/bin
rm htop.zip

Run htop by entering htop into Terminal