How to Manage Linux Processes With htop – Guide

htop is a Linux tool divided into three sections (CPU and memory usage information, average load uptime and process view) that allows real-time monitoring of processes. It was created to replace the Unix command-line utility “top” and is much easier to use for simple, common tasks. Htop is an interactive system monitor, process viewer and process manager designed for Unix systems. Originally conceived as an alternative to the Unix program top, it offers virtually the same functionality as top, but offers much more flexibility in viewing system processes. Unlike top, htop provides the full list of running processes rather than the most resource intensive ones. Htop can display processes as a tree and uses colors to provide resource usage statistics. htop is an interactive mouse and keyboard. It has bright colors that help to give you quick and quick visual information about your system’s status. Tasks such as finding and eliminating annoying processes can be easily performed without entering their PIDs, and the process list can be sorted and filtered quickly.

Installation

Ubuntu/Linux

CentOS/RedHat/Fedora

Mac

From source file

To install the latest version of htop, you can download the tarball file here. To extract the tarball file use the command htop.tar.gz is the name of the file you downloaded.

Introduction to htop

After we finish installing the htop tool, we can now start it by typing the htop command in the terminal. In the upper left corner, CPU usage is represented by percentages using different colored bars for different types of processes, and the CPU core is indicated by the number of bars. Two CPU metric modes are Color denotation for Standard Mode is given below: Memory Usage and Swap are present below the CPU Usage bars. It displays the amount of memory consumed by processes.

home menu

Customizations are made in the htop configuration menu and to access the menu press F2. There are four categories where you can customize the top menu: Setup, Left Column, Right Column and Available Meters. They are used to configure gauges, set display options, set color standards, and choose columns to print them in order.

display options

Customizing the display using the htop command by pressing F2 and then navigating to the display options. In the settings we have chosen, highlight the new and old processes, where it will separate all the old and new processes and display them. Navigating to the display column we can change the htop terminal display options, here we change the terminal color to night black.

Using htop commands

In htop you can scroll horizontally and vertically with the help of “Up and Down” and “Left and Right” to cycle through the processes.

Final note

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