Wednesday·01·December·2010
Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: htop //at 02:20 //by abe
You probably know about “top”, in Debian and Ubuntu part of the procps package.
Ever wanted to see CPU and memory usage as bars and not numbers?
Ever wanted to kill a process from inside top by just selecting its row instead of having to type its pid?
Ever tried to press a cursor key inside top? It makes a noise and says “Unknown command - try ‘h’ for help”. Short said: top is not that interactive.
Ever wanted top to be more colorful?
Well, there is a solution to all these issues. It’s called htop (Debian package) and is some kind of colorful, ncurses based cross-over between top and a Midnight Commander for processes:
More screenshots of htop at
screenshot.debian.net and at the
project’s site at SourceForge.
It can do many things, top can’t do:
- Different color themes including fore- and background (includes also a monochrome theme for people considering ANSI colors being eye cancer :-)
- Highlighting the current user’s processes.
- Scrolling up, down and sidewards.
- Interactively selecting processes with cursor keys as well as with the mouse.
- Kill or renice the selected process without having to enter its pid
- Show the CPU usage for each core and a CPU usage summary at the same time.
- Show CPU, memory and swap usage as textual bars, either encoded in colors or characters.
- Easy interactive configuring while running.
- Automatically saves the current state (sort order, color scheme, etc.)
- Easy access to the most often used functions through F-keys like in Midnight Commander.
One more cool thing about htop: It’s also available on the Nokia N900 as “app”.
The only thing I found so far that top can do, but htop can’t, is
top’s batch mode (e.g. with “top -b -n 1”) where it runs
non-interactively and its output can even be piped to other processes.
The Xymon/Hobbit
monitoring system uses that as input for some machine statistics.
Tagged as: ANSI, Eye Cancer, fatboy, htop, Maemo, mc, N900, ncurses, nemo, Nokia, nuggets, top, UUUT
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