CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real)  9  Chapter 5: The Linux Operating System       9  Command Line Functions And Administrative Utilities            9  Process Management

pstree - Show Process Relationships 1 kill - Terminate A Process

The top command can be used to provide a running snapshot of system activity. The top command shows a collection of information about various system resources such as: system load information, memory usage (both RAM and swap disk), as well as a listing of many of the processes currently running on the system, usually ordered by the percentage of CPU time being consumed. top by default will update every 30 seconds, top can be configured to suit many needs.

Here’s what the top display looks like:

10:33am up 140 days 14:33 5 users, load ave: 0.05 0.06 0.07

processes: 77 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped

Mem:770748K av,748624K used,22124K free,0K shrd,160120K buf

Swap:716784K av,40416K used,676368K free 296156K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND

22372 root 16 0 54068 46M 5596 S 2.5 6.2 66:03 X

25497 phil 15 0 15528 14M 12980 R 2.3 1.8 0:52 kdeinit

7240 phil 16 0 1232 1232 904 R 1.1 0.1 0:00 top

22468 phil 10 0 868 864 648 S 0.5 0.1 184:55 autorun

22452 phil 9 0 14364 13M 12576 S 0.1 1.8 0:57 kdeinit

1 root 8 0 580 476 476 S 0.0 0.0 0:05 init

2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:01 kevntd

3 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 ksftrq

4 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:34 kswapd

5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflsh

6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kupdat

8 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 scsieh

9 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 khubd

11 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 11:46 kjourn

535 root 9 0 684 580 580 S 0.0 0.0 17:54 syslog

540 root 9 0 1368 520 520 S 0.0 0.0 4:41 klogd

645 root 9 0 912 596 596 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 sshd

665 root 8 0 1096 916 876 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 xinetd

685 root 9 0 1180 932 932 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 safemys

Other options or help for this command can be found by typing a “?” while the command is running.

pstree - Show Process Relationships 1 kill - Terminate A Process