How do i see what the CPU usage is in % from the command line.? I have already tried TOP, but I need something simpler.

you could try seems simpler though looks quite featuresless to me

would it be possible to pipe the first 5 lines of the results from a 'TOP' command into a text file.
I've tried TOP > toptest.txt, but the TOP program just keeps hanging.

I got this from man top

though it gives the full output, you might want to read the man in order to get properly what you want

You could also do:

watch vmstat

want to know what it does?

man watch

Unfortunately it (vmwatch) deals only with memory, not CPU utilization. I searched and could not find any utilities to dump CPU utilization of the moment. There is documentation on the system calls (obviously) for each item you want to watch, and the source for "top" is readily available, so it wouldn't be a huge project to lift some of the code out of top, put together a vmstat-like utility which takes a CPU utilization snapshot of the moment and display a summary. You can then use watch to keep a constantly-updated view of the system.

There are of course X solutions like superkaramba, kwatch, xos, and the like, but obviously running those via X over SSH is computationally expensive so a console app is a better solution.

With all of that said: what's wrong with top? what is it in top which makes it inappropriate? Maybe if we do some digging we could find something more suitable for you.

Yes, vmstat does check CPU utilization