Open Source · MIT · Pure bash · macOS & Linux
sheerstatus
**Is this machine still fine, or is it time?**
Every "system optimizer" answers that question with a number it wants you to be frightened of. sheerstatus answers it with a verdict you can check: three lines on memory, storage and battery, each saying which side of the line you're on and why. One shell script, zero daemons, nothing resident, nothing sent anywhere.
Sister tool to sheersweep — that one reclaims space, this one tells you whether space is even the problem.
How it reads your machine
1.
Take the readings
Swap in use, compressed memory, disk pressure, battery health and cycle count, live and lifetime temperature — from your OS's own instruments (sysctl, ioreg, /proc, /sys). No agent, no background process, no history file. It runs when you run it.
2.
Say which side of the line
A reading is not an answer. Each pillar gets a verdict — fine, worth watching, or already costing you — against thresholds that scale with your hardware rather than a number someone hard-coded in 2015.
3.
Say what to do about it
One short recommendation, and only when there is something to say. If the machine is healthy it tells you that in one line and stops, because that is the honest answer and you have things to do.
What's inside
A verdict, not a dashboard
Three pillars, three lines: memory, storage, battery. Each carries PASS, WARN or CRIT — and the middle rung exists because "getting full" and "already thrashing" are not the same reading.
It knows the difference between slow and doomed
Swap thresholds scale with your actual RAM; storage warns near the throttling point rather than at a round number; battery reads real capacity and cycles, not a percentage badge. Fewer false alarms, and the alarms that fire mean something.
The pre-upgrade question, answered
"Should I buy more RAM or more storage?" gets a direct answer based on what your machine is actually short of — or an equally direct "neither, you're fine".
Zero daemons, zero network
Nothing installs, nothing stays running, nothing phones home. It reads, it prints, it exits. You can read the whole script in a sitting and see that for yourself.
macOS and Linux, really
Native readers for both — ioreg and sysctl on a Mac, /proc and /sys on Linux, ARM64 included. Verified on both in CI, because a cross-platform claim that only ever runs on one platform is not a claim.
--json carries the verdict
Not just the readings — the answer, in the same three words the report prints, so a monitor never has to re-derive the thresholds and drift from the tool about the same machine. A reading it can't take is null, never the string "N/A".
Nine languages
English · Japanese · Traditional Chinese · Simplified Chinese · Korean · Spanish · German · French · Portuguese. Every sentence, not just the labels — with a build gate that fails if a single key is missing a single language.
One language across the family
sheerstatus, sheersweep and clikae share one rendering vocabulary — the same badges, the same marks, the same units your Mac shows you. Learn to read one and you can read all three.
Try it
npx sheerstatus and it runs — nothing installed, nothing left behind, which was the idea all along. If you'd rather not involve Node, curl the one bash file, read it, then run it: same script, and it's what a Linux box without Node wants. No install step, no daemon, no account either way. MIT, macOS and Linux.