TOP is a handy utility for monitoring the utilization of your system. It is invoked from the command line and it works by displaying lots of useful information, including CPU and memory usage, the number of running processes, load, the top resource hitters, and other useful bits. By default, top refreshes its report every 3 seconds.
Most of us use top in this fashion; we run it inside the terminal, look on the statistics for a few seconds and then graciously quit and continue our work.
But what if you wanted to monitor the usage of your system resources unattended? In other words, let some system administration utility run and collect system information and write it to a log file every once in a while. Better yet, what if you wanted to run such a utility only for a given period of time, again without any user interaction?
There are many possible answers:
You could schedule a job via cron.
You could run a shell script that runs ps every X seconds or so in a loop, incrementing a counter until the desired number of interactions elapsed. But you would also need uptime to check the load and several other commands to monitor disk utilization and what not.
Instead of going wild about trying to patch a script, there's a much, much simpler solution: top in batch mode.
top can be run non-interactively, in batch mode. Time delay and the number of iterations can be configured, giving you the ability to dictate the data collection as you see fit. Here's an example:
top -b -d 10 -n 3 >> top-file
We have top running in batch mode (-b). It's going to refresh every 10 seconds, as specified by the delay (-d) flag, for a total count of 3 iterations (-n). The output will be sent to a file. A few screenshots:
And that does the trick. Speaking of writing to files ...
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