The below command outputs a lot status and statistical information about the battery. The /org/...path can be found with the command upower -e (--enumerate).
upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0
Example output:
native-path: /sys/devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0C0A:00/power_supply/BAT0
vendor: NOTEBOOK
model: BAT
serial: 0001
power supply: yes
updated: Thu Feb 9 18:42:15 2012 (1 seconds ago)
has history: yes
has statistics: yes
battery
present: yes
rechargeable: yes
state: charging
energy: 22.3998 Wh
energy-empty: 0 Wh
energy-full: 52.6473 Wh
energy-full-design: 62.16 Wh
energy-rate: 31.6905 W
voltage: 12.191 V
time to full: 57.3 minutes
percentage: 42.5469%
capacity: 84.6964%
technology: lithium-ion
History (charge):
1328809335 42.547 charging
1328809305 42.020 charging
1328809275 41.472 charging
1328809245 41.008 charging
History (rate):
1328809335 31.691 charging
1328809305 32.323 charging
1328809275 33.133 charging
You could use tools like grep to get just the information you want from all that output.
One simple way: piping the above command into
grep -E "state|to\ full|percentage"
outputs:
state: charging
time to full: 57.3 minutes
percentage: 42.5469%
If you would often like to run that command, then you could make a Bash alias for the whole command. Example:
alias bat='upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0| grep -E "state|to\ full|percentage"'
Add that to the end of your .bashrc file, and you can type ‘bat’ any time, in the terminal.
There is also a upower -d (--dump) command that shows information for all available power resources such as laptop batteries, external mice, etc.