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Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

Terminal - Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage
ps aux | sort -nk +4 | tail
2009-01-23 17:12:33
User: root
Functions: ps sort
86
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Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

ps returns all running processes which are then sorted by the 4th field in numerical order and the top 10 are sent to STDOUT.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
ps -eo rss,vsz,pid,cputime,cmd --width 100 --sort rss,vsz | tail --lines 10
2012-01-08 20:51:38
User: kenyon
Functions: ps tail
1
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Display the top 10 running processes - sorted by memory usage

A pretty nice display of processes.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

The +n option is considered deprecated - a more up-to-date version of this command would be:

ps aux | sort -b -k 4 | tail

Comment by morpheus 171 weeks and 5 days ago

watch --differences -n 2 'ps aux | sort -r -nk +4 | head'

Comment by unixmonkey611 171 weeks and 2 days ago

whats wrong with

ps -auxw --sort rss

Comment by eneville 170 weeks and 3 days ago

ps aux | sort -nrk 4 | head

displays the same but in reverse order.

Comment by Roman 170 weeks and 1 day ago

Whats the best way to output the highest usage by CPU ?

Comment by felix001 148 weeks and 1 day ago

@felix001:

ps aux | sort -nrk 3 | head
Comment by pstadler 136 weeks and 1 day ago

More useful output - I just want memory usage and full command line:

ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS
Comment by craigds 128 weeks and 3 days ago

Your point of view

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