This is the simple tool I use to refresh my dwm status line. It's self contained in the way that it doesn't spawn any external processes. It displays - date and time - battery level and state - load averages - the song currently played by MusicPD It refreshes every second with the exception of the currently played song which is refreshed every five seconds. You may use this as is or you can use this as a boilerplate to bootstrap your own dwm-status tool. Dependencies: - a POSIX system - Xlib - libmpdclient Caveat: - The Makefile is a BSD-style makefile using the FreeBSD make infrastructure, you may have to provide your own Makefile or compile by hand. - You may have to rewrite parts of battery.c if you are not using FreeBSD. - The code uses the non-standard convenience function getloadavg(3) (isolated in bsd.c) to get the load averages. This is a BSDism but you might be lucky and your libc provides this function (glibc does, by the way). If your libc is missing this function you will have to provide your own implementation. Have fun.