efficient way to parse vmstat output

Question

I'm trying to efficiently parse vmstat output preferably in awk or sed, it also should work on both linux and hp-ux. For example I would like to cut cpu idle % ("92" in this case) from the following output:

$ vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
11  0 385372 101696  61704 650716    0    1     5     9    6   12  5  2 92  0

unfortunately the vmstat output can differ on different linux distributions and hp-ux, also columns can vary in length and can be presented in other order.

I tried to write some nice awk oneliner, but eventually ended with python solution:

$ vmstat | python -c 'import sys; print dict(zip(*map(str.split, sys.stdin)[-2:])).get("id")'
92

Do you know better way to parse mentioned output, to get number values of desired column name?

Answer 1

using awk you can do:

vmstat | awk '(NR==2){for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)if($i=="id"){getline; print $i}}'

This should get value of "id" column on Linux as well as on HP-UX or any other standard unix system.

Tested on Linux, HP-UX and Solaris.

Answer 2

$ vmstat | python -c 'import sys; print sys.stdin.readlines()[-1].split()[-2]'
95