Sunday, October 6, 2019

Monitor Specific Process w/Top


Top is the amazing utility that allows you to peek at the performance of your system.  By default, top shows the overall system performance in the header and shows a subset of the running processes.  Sometimes you're simply interested in a specific process and while the default presentation will show your process when it's part of the process subset list.

If you're interested in a specific process you can specify the process id on the command line:
$ top -p <pid>

That works very well, but requires you know the process id to specify.

The pgrep command allows looking up a process id by name.  For example, if you're interested in the process id of top you can get it by specifying;

$ pgrep top

Pair these together and you can ask top to show the process overview of the top process;

$ top -p `pgrep top`


Hope you find this useful.

Cheers.

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