top is very popular and well known system monitoring tool provided by default by most of the Linux distributions. htop is more eye candy and more professional system monitor tool which is provided by most of the Linux distributions. In this tutorial we will look how to install and use  htop command to monitor cpu, memory etc.

Linux Top – Monitor Linux System Resources Cpu, Memory, Network

We can use mouse even htopis an console application because it supports extended console features. We can select menu and processes with mouse pointer.

Install For Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, Mint

htop is very lightweight tool and installed with apt package manager.

$ sudo apt install htop

Install For Fedora, CentOS, RHEL

We can install with yum like below. We can also prefer dnf for Fedora.

$ sudo yum install htop

Run htop

We can run htop from command line just like below. This will start a screen where CPU cores and their load are graphically presented and the list of the process listed according to CPU usage.

List Processes As Tree

As Linux processes will have some hierarchy which creates child and parent relationship between processes. We can show this relationship in a tree form with F5 key.

Filter Processes

We can filter processes according to their name, path and related options. We can set filter with F4 command. In this example we will only list process those have /usr/bin path and filter.

Kill Process

We can also kill selected process with F9 key. This will show a signal list like below. We can select the signal we want to send to the process which is SIGTERM by default. Keep in mind that we also need privileges to kill selected process.

We can cancel the kill operation with Esc key.

Customize htop Screen

We have the ability to customize htop screen. We can select which statistics will be shown in Left Column , Rigth Column and Colors. We will use F2 key for this operation.