Tools: Top InfoMan

TOP (or, uh, ‘top’) – lowercase, most likely, unless you’ve changed the name as the ‘main page’
states specifically that you are allowed to do so under the terms of the license if you so choose.

I digress. Not graphical in the way of Task Manager, but it does the job, quite well in fact. Check it out:

From your Linux Task Manager, open a terminal: xterm or eterm or gterm or whatever-term you want and type in the command
‘top’. Up comes a nice display of processes in going on inside your system and other info: uptime, load average,
number of tasks, memory, CPU usage and more. You even can _kill_ (see man://dir | User Commands | kill or ‘man kill’)
processes from here, a bit like End Task. Various are the ways of viewing information within top. I find myself using
top when my system slows to a crawl – quite often I find that a program is taking too many CPU cycles, and, as long
as I am the owner of that process (which top will tell you), I’ll kill that process and get back to work. Just hope
I saved that document in oowriter.

Info Man To learn more about top, open another *term and type ‘man top’ Or, if top is still open,
press ‘q’ then type ‘man top’. And even still, if using KDE, open the man pages by typing this in Konqueror’s
address bar: man://dir. Navigate to “User Commands” and then click on ‘top’. Then read. At least act curious.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to know how to look for – and find – information. And yet, it
is so easy! There is so much available at our fingertips if we only know what keystrokes to type. And man
and info can help. They are your friends. Get to know them. In fact, read them before you ask questions. They
explain programs to you – what they are for, how to use them, and even information about bugs. So learn to
use them. Man and info. And if you still cannot figure out what you need to do or what you may be doing
wrong, you are now armed with more knowledge and can ask better questions!