Quickies, by Andrea Olivato

memtop: order top by %Mem using expect

Top is one of the commands I use the most while working on linux servers. It’s terribly useful and configurable, got a clean interface and is simple to modify its output using shortcuts.

A lot of times I need to order top by memory percentage instead of cpu percentage. This can be easily achieved by pressing ‘M’ while looking at top.

As I’m really (terribly) lazy and I wanted to test my ‘expect’ discovery, I decided to create a simple script (can be also used as an alias I believe) to run top ordered by %mem directly from bash.

Please note that I know about existing python/perl script that creates mem orderer output from ps command, but that’s not what I wanted…

This is one of my firsts expect scripts, more will come as I really love it… here’s what came out

#!/bin/bash
# This script depends on expect tcl utility. 
# Please install it before running this code.

expect -c "
    spawn top       
    expect order                    
    send \"M\"                                      
    expect eof                                                      
"