Finally, there's a command you can use to display updating information about
the processes running on the system. This command is called
top(1), and is started like so:
This will display a full screen of information about the processes running
on the system, as well as some overall information about the system. This
includes load average, number of proceses, the CPU status, free memory
information, and details about processes including PID, user, priority,
CPU and memory usage information, running time, and program name.
It's called top because the most CPU intensive programs
will be listed at the top. An interesting note is that top
will be listed first on most inactive (and some active) systems because of its
CPU utilization. However, top is quite useful for
determining what program is misbehaving and needs to be killed off.