Terminal Hacks – Monitor System Activity In Terminal With Mac OS

This hack will show you how to display system information (process statistics and resource usage) as well as a real time list of processes and threads that are currently running. An alternative to having to open the Activity Monitor application on your Mac.

Show System Activity Monitor On Mac OS

Open Terminal: Finder > Applications > Utilities

In Terminal, type or paste the following…

top

(return)

By default %CPU is the default sort column (highlighted in white).

To exit the activity monitor, type or paste the following…

q

(return)

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Show System Activity Monitor and Define a Column to Sort By

Open Terminal: Finder > Applications > Utilities

In Terminal, type or paste one of the following…

_{To sort by %CPU [central processing unit usage]}
top -o cpu

_{To sort by %MEM [memory usage]}
top -o mem

_{To sort by PID [a task’s unique process ID]}
top -o pid

_{To sort by TIME [the amount of time in hundredths of a second a process has run for since last reboot]}
top -o time

_{To sort by COMMAND [the command that initiated the process]}
top -o command

(return)

::TIP:: you can sort by any column displayed in the activity monitor simply type the columns name after top -o .

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Terminating a Process In Terminal For Mac OS

Make a note of the PID ID number shown in the activity monitor.

Open Terminal: Finder > Applications > Utilities

In Terminal, type or paste one of the following…

kill 0000

[replace 0000 with the PID number of the process you wish to terminate]

(return)

Dates posted and updated.

Originally posted 27 April, 2025.