Authored by William LeFevre, in most Unix-like operating systems, the top command produces a constantly-updated list of all resident processes, listed in order of Central processing unit usage. It shows how much processing power and memory is used, as well as other information the running processes.

It is very useful for system administrators.

= Example =

load averages: 0.04, 0.03, 0.03 16:45:14 34 processes: 33 sleeping, 1 on cpu CPU states: % idle, % user, % kernel, % iowait, % swap Memory: 4096M real, 2990M free, 1396M swap in use, 2788M swap free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME CPU COMMAND 644 root 1 59 0 4544K 2904K sleep 0:00 0.37% sshd 420 patrol 1 29 10 26M 23M sleep 16.8H 0.09% PatrolAgent 656 gbeeker 1 49 0 2072K 1216K cpu/2 0:00 0.05% top

For a non-realtime list of processes, see ps (Unix).

= External links =