Unknown symbol entries when grepping top output

Question

I'm developing a bash script file that will log all CPU data, but when I log that data to log file I'm getting some irregular symbol entries in that log file.

echo "Hi" $(top -n 1 | grep 'Mem' | cut -d ':' -f2 | cut -d ',' -f1 | cut -d 't' -f1) >> tst1

This command will print total available memory. Now in the terminal I'm getting proper values, also in cat I'm getting proper values, but when I open this log file in gedit, at that time I'm getting some unknown symbol entries like:

(B[m[39;49m(B[m 3918912k (B[m[39;49m

Now I don't know how this unknown guests get into my log file.

Answer 1

top uses ANSI escape codes to highlight memory values, which your terminal is able to interpret but your text editor isn't. For your need, you're probably better off reading /proc/meminfo directly, like this:

cat /proc/meminfo|grep MemTotal|awk '{print $2}' >> tst1