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.
The following is an example output of the command 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. Replace UID
with the user ID of the
user. top -U $(id -u username) returns the
UID of the user on the basis of the username and
displays his processes.