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The "Exercise 11: top" Lesson is part of the full, Full Stack for Front End Engineers course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

In this exercise, students use a task manager program to create a list of running processes on a server. Then Jem reviews top and also installs htop, an alternative to top with a color interface.

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Transcript from the "Exercise 11: top" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Jem Young: All right, we are in a server now. So, let's just run a quick exercise.
>> Jem Young: Just go out on your server. Just go ahead and run top.
>> Jem Young: So, I'll do that now.
>> Jem Young: Top. Top is, think of it as the equivalent of Activity Monitor on Mac, or your Task Manager on Windows.

[00:00:32] It just tells you what's happening on your system, what's using up a lot of processes. I use top quite often if the system's slow. We can see, nodes eating up two cores of my CPU, or it's eating up all my RAM, things like that. Top is just one of those utilities you have in your belt just to see to see what's going on in my system.

[00:00:50] There is something called htop, which is a little bit cleaner. And to quit out of top, just hit q.
>> Jem Young: So, again, top to get in. Just type q to quit. So, let's see if htop is installed.
>> Speaker 2: I had to install it.
>> Jem Young: It's not installed. So, to install it let's just say apt-get.

[00:01:14] Apt-get is the package manager for Ubuntu. Install htop.
>> Speaker 2: Do you have to type get anymore?
>> Jem Young: I guess you don't. I guess [CROSSTALK]. Nice. They really flying along. Okay, so, now we can say htop, which is a prettier version of top.
>> Jem Young: And htop is pretty popular.

[00:01:44] I tend to use it a bit more than top, just cuz it's nicer to look at, easier to recognize. But, again, top is gonna be installed on most Linux distributions without installing anything. So, it's good to know kinda the core utilities. So, anything interesting happening? Not really. We're actually using,

[00:02:04]
>> Jem Young: No, nothing really interesting happening, cuz there's nothing running. Just basic system commands, so far.
>> Jem Young: And to quit out of htop, just type q, just like normal.