Question: Reading the Output of Top

[Parham Doustdar]

Hi John,

    I doubt that there is an answer to your first question. You could
    probably write a script to do it.

Top is unusable without such a feature, but you and other people 
replying to this thread seem to be using it just fine. So, what tricks 
do people use in order to memorize what column is for what value? I have 
this problem when reading the output of commands like |free -m|, too.

Thanks!

On 5/6/2016 6:00 PM, John G Heim wrote:

> I doubt that there is an answer to your first question. You could 
> probably write a script to do it.
>
> As for your second question, I run top thusly, 'top -bn1 | more'. This 
> runs top in batch mode and has it retrieve the data just once. Piping 
> the output to more keeps the data from scrolling off the top. What you 
> get is a snapshot of the data at the moment you run the top command.
>
> PS: You can also set the refresh rate for top to something high enough 
> for you to listen to the output.
>
>
>
> On 05/06/2016 01:59 AM, Parham Doustdar wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> What do you do when you want to read content of a command like |top|? 
>> There are two issues with it:
>>
>> 1. There is no way of knowing the title of a column without first
>>    navigating to the headers. I want to be able to go to the
>>    next/previous column, know the title of a column, etc.
>> 2. The output keeps changing. For example, while I’m reading one line,
>>    its CPU usage might drop and cause it to be reordered in the list.
>>
>> How do you get through these issues?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> ​
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