TOP Memory Sorting

[Hank Phan]

Hello...I'm at a company where due to cost and licensing they have chosen not to install Glance/GlancePlus(even the trial version).

So...is there a way to sort by the RES column in TOP? I've read threads where supposedly the 'M' command while in TOP will sort that column...but no dice. This is on HP-UX B.11.23.

Any comments appreciated, thanks in advance.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

You can use 'ps' under the XPG4 (UNIX95) option and sort processes by descending process size:

# UNIX95= ps -e -o "user,vsz,pid,ppid,args" | awk 'NR>1' | sort -rnk2

Note the blank (space) character after the equal sign and before the 'ps' command. This sets the UNIX95 option for the command line only.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Hank Phan]

Thanks James...but there's no way to sort the RES column in TOP?

[Heironimus]

I think the version of top that HP ships can not do this. It doesn't support a lot of things that newer versions of top do. You could try to install a recent version from the Porting and Archive Centre or compile it yourself.

[spex]

Hi Hank,

William LeFebvre's version of top, available at the Porting and Archiving Center, does support sorting top output by a number of fields, including res.

According to top(1):
-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.

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/top-3.6alpha9/man.html

PCS