poor man's uptime on macOS by parsing JSON output of system_profiler

uptime2.sh

system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType -json |
jq --raw-output --argjson labels '[ "day", "hour", "minute", "second" ]' '
.SPSoftwareDataType[0].uptime[3:] // empty | split(":") as $uptime |

def pprint:
  ($uptime[.] | tonumber) as $val |
  if $val == 0 then empty else
    "\($val) \($labels[.])" + (if $val == 1 then "" else "s" end)
  end;

[range($uptime|length)] | map(pprint) | join(", ")'

Localization example

You can localize the strings by modifying the labels string passed in via --argjson... e.g. Spanish

jq --raw-output --argjson labels '[ "día", "hora", "minuto", "segundo" ]' ...

Output:

2 días, 9 horas, 52 minutos, 34 segundos

Another example, showing ONLY hours:

system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType -json |
jq --raw-output --argjson labels '[ "day", "hour", "minute", "second" ]' '
.SPSoftwareDataType[0].uptime[3:] // empty | split(":") as $uptime |

def pprint:
  ($uptime[.] | tonumber) as $val |
  "\($val) \($labels[.])" + (if $val == 1 then "" else "s" end);

[1] | map(pprint) | join(", ")'

Output:

12 hours

Another example: calculate and display uptime in the form of seconds

system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType -json |
jq --raw-output '
.SPSoftwareDataType[0].uptime[3:] // empty |
split(":") | map(tonumber) as $uptime |
[86400, 3600, 60] as $multipliers |
reduce range($uptime|length) as $i (0; . + ($uptime[$i] * ($multipliers[$i] // 1)))'

Output

216416

Related SO post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78425192/617864