Here’s a way to use getopt to handle arguments when creating command line applications. It works quite well with the standard help (–help or -h) by showing usage when bad arguments are passed.

So, for a single core single processor machine a load average of 1 means that on average there’s a process in the running or runnable state at all times. This means the CPU average is at 100% too. If another process wants to run, it has to wait in the queue before being executed. For a multi-core or multi-processor system, you’re not CPU bound until the load average equals the total number of cores. You can calculate a system’s CPU utilization by dividing the load average by the number of processors you see in /proc/cpuinfo