Solaris/TOP

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Top makes a distinction between terminals that support advanced capabilities and those that do not. This distinction affects the choice of defaults for certain options. In the remainder of this document, an "intelligent" terminal is one that supports cursor addressing, clear screen, and clear to end of line. Conversely, a "dumb" terminal is one that does not support such features. If the output of top is redirected to a file, it acts as if it were being run on a dumb terminal.  

OPTIONS

-C

Turn off the use of color in the display.

-I

Do not display idle processes. By default, top displays both active and idle processes.

-S

Show system processes in the display. Normally, system processes such as the pager and the swapper are not shown. This option makes them visible.

-T

List all available color tags and the current set of tests used for color highlighting, then exit.

-b

Use "batch" mode. In this mode, all input from the terminal is ignored. Interrupt characters (such as ^C and ^\) still have an effect. This is the default on a dumb terminal, or when the output is not a terminal.

-c

Show the full command line for each process. Default is to show just the command name. This option is not supported on all platforms.

-i

Use "interactive" mode. In this mode, any input is immediately read for processing. See the section on "Interactive Mode" for an explanation of which keys perform what functions. After the command is processed, the screen will immediately be updated, even if the command was not understood. This mode is the default when standard output is an intelligent terminal.

-n

Use "non-interactive" mode. This is indentical to "batch" mode.

-q

Renice top to -20 so that it will run faster. This can be used when the system is being very sluggish to improve the possibility of discovering the problem. This option can only be used by root.

-u

Do not take the time to map uid numbers to usernames. Normally, top will read as much of the file "/etc/passwd" as is necessary to map all the user id numbers it encounters into login names. This option disables all that, while possibly decreasing execution time. The uid numbers are displayed instead of the names.

-v

Write version number information to stderr then exit immediately. No other processing takes place when this option is used. To see current revision information while top is running, use the help command "?".

-dcount

Show only count displays, then exit. A display is considered to be one update of the screen. This option allows the user to select the number of displays he wants to see before top automatically exits. For intelligent terminals, no upper limit is set. The default is 1 for dumb terminals.

-stime

Set the delay between screen updates to time seconds. The default delay between updates is seconds.

-ofield

Sort the process display area on the specified field. The field name is the name of the column as seen in the output, but in lower case. Likely values are "cpu", "size", "res", and "time", but may vary on different operating systems. Note that not all operating systems support this option.

-Uusername

Show only those processes owned by username. This option currently only accepts usernames and will not understand uid numbers.

Both count and number fields can be specified as "infinite", indicating that they can stretch as far as possible. This is accomplished by using any proper prefix of the keywords "infinity", "maximum", or "all". The default for count on an intelligent terminal is, in fact, infinity.

The environment variable TOP is examined for options before the command line is scanned. This enables a user to set his or her own defaults. The number of processes to display can also be specified in the environment variable TOP. The options -C, -I, -S, and -u are actually toggles. A second specification of any of these options will negate the first. Thus a user who has the environment variable TOP set to "-I" may use the command "top -I" to see idle processes.  

INTERACTIVE MODE

These commands are currently recognized (^L refers to control-L):

^L

Redraw the screen.

h or ?

Display a summary of the commands (help screen). Version information is included in this display.

q

Quit top.

d

Change the number of displays to show (prompt for new number). Remember that the next display counts as one, so typing d1 will make top show one final display and then immediately exit.

n or #

Change the number of processes to display (prompt for new number).

s

Change the number of seconds to delay between displays (prompt for new number).

k

Send a signal ("kill" by default) to a list of processes. This acts similarly to the command kill(1)).

r

Change the priority (the "nice") of a list of processes. This acts similarly to the command renice(8)).

u

Display only processes owned by a specific username (prompt for username). If the username specified is simply "+", then processes belonging to all users will be displayed.

o

Change the order in which the display is sorted. This command is not available on all systems. The sort key names vary fron system to system but usually include: "cpu", "res", "size", "time". The default is cpu.

e

Display a list of system errors (if any) generated by the last kill or renice command.

i

(or I) Toggle the display of idle processes.

c

Toggle the display of the full command line.

C

Toggle the use of color in the display.

THE DISPLAY

The top few lines of the display show general information about the state of the system, including the last process id assigned to a process (on most systems), the three load averages, the current time, the number of existing processes, the number of processes in each state (sleeping, running, starting, zombies, and stopped), and a percentage of time spent in each of the processor states (user, nice, system, and idle). It also includes information about physical and virtual memory allocation.

The remainder of the screen displays information about individual processes. This display is similar in spirit to ps(1) but it is not exactly the same. The columns displayed by top will differ slightly between operating systems. Generally, the following fields are displayed:

PID

The process id.

USERNAME

Username of the process's owner (if -u is specified, a UID column will be substituted for USERNAME).

PRI

Current priority of the process.

NICE

Nice amount in the range -20 to 20, as established by the use of the command nice.

SIZE

Total size of the process (text, data, and stack) given in kilobytes.

RES

Resident memory: current amount of process memory that resides in physical memory, given in kilobytes.

STATE

Current state (typically one of "sleep", "run", "idl", "zomb", or "stop").

TIME

Number of system and user cpu seconds that the process has used.

CPU

Percentage of available cpu time used by this process.

COMMAND

Name of the command that the process is currently running.

COLOR

The environment variable is a sequence of color specifications, separated by colons. Each specification takes the form tag=min,max#code where tag is the name of the value to check, min and max specify a range for the value, and code is an ANSI color code. Multiple color codes can be listed and separated with semi-colons. A missing min implies the lowest possible value (usually 0) and a missing max implies infinity. The comma must always be present. When specifying numbers for load averages, they should be multiplied by 100. For example, the specification 1min=500,1000#31 indicates that a 1 minute load average between 5 and 10 should be displayed in red. Color attributes can be combined. For example, the specification 5min=1000,#37;41 indicates that a 5 minute load average higher than 10 should be displayed with white characters on a red background. A special tag named header is used to control the color of the header for process display. It should be specified with no lower and upper limits, specifically header=,# followed by the ANSI color code.

You can see a list of color codes recognized by this installation of top with the -T option. This will also show the current set of tests used for color highligting, as specified in the environment.  

AUTHOR

ENVIRONMENT

BUGS

SEE ALSO

SUNOS 5 NOTES

The memory summary line displays the following: "phys mem" is the total amount of physical memory that can be allocated for use by processes (it does not include memory reserved for the kernel's use), "free mem" is the amount of unallocated physical memory, "total swap" is the amount of swap area on disk that is being used, "free swap" is the amount of swap area on disk that is still available. Unlike previous versions of top, The swap figures will differ from the summary output of swap(1M) since the latter includes physical memory as well.

The column "THR" indicates the number of execution threads in the process.

In BSD Unix, process priority was represented internally as a signed offset from a zero value with an unsigned value. The "zero" value was usually something like 20, allowing for a range of priorities from -20 to 20. As implemented on SunOS 5, older versions of top continued to interpret process priority in this manner, even though it was no longer correct. Starting with top version 3.5, this was changed to agree with the rest of the system.

The SunOS 5 (Solaris 2) port was originally written by Torsten Kasch, <torsten@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>. Many contributions have been provided by Casper Dik <Casper.Dik@sun.com>. Support for multi-cpu, calculation of CPU% and memory stats provided by Robert Boucher <boucher@sofkin.ca>, Marc Cohen <marc@aai.com>, Charles Hedrick <hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu>, and William L. Jones <jones@chpc>.