Is there a way to get battery info (status, plugged in, etc) without reading a proc/sys file on linux?

Question

I want to get information about the battery in C on linux. I don't want to read or parse any file! Is there any low-level interface to acpi/the kernel or any other module to get the information I want to have?

I already searched the web, but every question results in the answer "parse /proc/foo/bar". I really don't want to do this because I think, low-level interfaces won't change as fast as Files do.

best regards.

Answer 1

The /proc filesystem does not exist on a disk. Instead, the kernel creates it in memory. They are generated on-demand by the kernel when accessed. As such, your concerns are invalid -- the /proc files will change as quickly as the kernel becomes aware of changes.

Check this for more info about /proc file system.

In any case, I don't believe there's any alternative interface.

Answer 2

You might be looking for UPower: http://upower.freedesktop.org/

This is a common need for both desktop environments and mobile devices, so there have been many solutions over time. For example, one of the oldest ones was acpid , which is pretty much obsolete now.

While I'd recommend using a light-weight abstraction like UPower for code clarity reasons, the files in /proc and (to some extent) /sys are considered part of the Linux kernel ABI, which means that changing them is generally frowned upon.