36.6. 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. 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.


SUSE LINUX Administration Guide 9.3