cheat sheet for top

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1 top

Is used on every unix/linux system I have ever come across. There are colour versions such as htop available, but these have to added and installed into the system, and so take up more resources. Here is a list of commands used by plain Jane vanilla top

  • d delay (default 3 seconds) before refreshing output
  • z colour screen red (toggle)
  • c toggle absolute path of running process
  • q quit
  • O sorting (but how?)
    • a PID
    • b PPID
    • d UID
    • e USER
    • r GROUP
    • g TTY
    • K CPU% CPU usage
    • l TIME CPU time
    • m TIME+ CPU time hundredths
    • n MEM% Memory usage
    • o VIRT virtual image (kb)
    • p SWAP swap space (kb)
    • q RESident size (kb)
    • r CODE size
    • s DATA stack size (kb)
    • t shared mem size (kb)
    • u Page fault count
    • v Dirty pages count
    • w process status
    • x command name/line
    • y sleeping function
    • z Task flags
  • k kill process
  • u top for a specific user's process top -u zintis
  • P sort by running processes CPU utilization
  • r renice a process *have to know all the process priority levels
  • h help
  • top -n 10 (will exit after 10 intervals.)

2 Save top resuls into a file:

top -n 1 -b > top-output.txt # this may get fairly long soon

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