top (software)

top

Stable release	3.2.8
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix-like
Type	Process Viewer / System monitor
License	GNU General Public License
Website	procps.sourceforge.net

top is a task manager program found in many Unix-like operating systems. It produces an ordered list of running processes selected by user-specified criteria, and updates it periodically. Default ordering by CPU usage, and only the top CPU consumers shown (hence the name.) top shows how much processing power and memory are being used, as well as other information about the running processes. Some versions of top allow extensive customization of the display, such as choice of columns or sorting method.

top is useful for system administrators, as it shows which users and processes are consuming the most system resources at any given time.

On Solaris, the roughly equivalent program is prstat. MS-DOS has tasklist and graphical Microsoft operating systems have the Windows Task Manager.

The ps program is similar to top, but instead produces a snapshot of processes taken at the time of invocation.

External links [edit]

Linux top home page (procps) and man page
BSD top home page and man page
Alternate top programs for Linux include atop (uses process accounting) and Htop

v t e Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat cd chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls lsattr lsof mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir size split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pidof pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history id logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more paste sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs

Shell builtins	alias echo expr printf sleep test true and false unset wait yes

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal date lp lpr

List of Unix utilities

See also [edit]

External links [edit]