I seem to be going with a theme here lately. Windows to Linux…. Well, here is yet another topic that fits this category. One of the things, that I find almost necessary in windows is the Task Manager. I use it mostly to kill locked applications and research a processes’ resource usage. What is the linux equivalent? Well, this is where “top” comes in.
Open a terminal window on your linux machine and type “top” and [Enter].
As you can see, top provides you with a list of processes running on your computer. The PID, user credentials, %CPU, %Memory and the command of each process is listed and updated by default every 5 seconds. This looks just like the processes tab of the Windows task manager, huh? Well, minus the fancy graphics.
Type “man top” [Enter] and you can find out how to modify the displayed data and filter data with switches.
If there is a process that is causing you issues, you can “kill” it with the following command:
kill [PID]
Type “man kill” [Enter] for more information on the kill command.
Enjoy!
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Top is absolutely essential to running a linux OS. I love the comparisons to Windows, that is how I teach noobs linux. This is like “XYZ” in Windows, and you see the light click on.