29.4. Processes: top

The command top (which stands for "table of processes") displays a list of processes that is refreshed every two seconds. To terminate the program, press Q. The parameter -n 1 terminates the program after a single display of the process list:

$ top -n 1
top - 14:19:53 up 62 days,  3:35, 14 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00
Tasks: 102 total,   7 running,  93 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie
Cpu(s):   0.3% user,   0.1% system,   0.0% nice,  99.6% idle
Mem:    514736k total,   497232k used,    17504k free,    56024k buffers
Swap:  1794736k total,   104544k used,  1690192k free,   235872k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  Command
 1426 root      15   0  116m  41m  18m S  1.0  8.2  82:30.34 X
20836 jj        15   0   820  820  612 R  1.0  0.2   0:00.03 top
    1 root      15   0   100   96   72 S  0.0  0.0   0:08.43 init
    2 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:04.96 keventd
    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.99 ksoftirqd_CPU0
    4 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:33.63 kswapd
    5 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.71 bdflush
        [...]
 1362 root      15   0   488  452  404 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.02 nscd
 1363 root      15   0   488  452  404 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.04 nscd
 1377 root      17   0    56    4    4 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 mingetty
 1379 root      18   0    56    4    4 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 mingetty
 1380 root      18   0    56    4    4 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 mingetty

If you press F while top is running, a menu opens with which to make extensive changes to the format of the output.

The parameter -U UID monitors only the processes associated with a particular user. Here, UID is the user ID of the user. The following command returns the UID of the user on the basis of the user name and displays his processes:

$ top -U $(id -u username)

SUSE LINUX 9.2