newbie question on TOP command

[neorder]

Can i have a detailed explaination on what TOP command shows?

PID: Process ID, you can kill this process by issuing "kill PID"

USER: Indicating who is running that particular process.

PRI: Priority, but who defined the process priority?

NI: what is it?

SIZE: what is it?

RSS: what is it?

SHARE: what is it?

STAT: what is it?

%CPU, %MEM: these must be the percentage use of CPU and MEM.

TIME: what is it?

CPU: show which CPU is being used?

COMMAND: process that is running.

who has a little time to explain those terms? thanks.

 

[jmstacey]

Copied from man pages using 'man top' command in FreeBSD 4.9

The actual display varies depending on the specific variant of Unix that the machine is running. This description may not exactly match what is seen by top running on this particular machine. Differences are listed at the end of this manual entry.

The top few lines of the display show general information about thestate of the system, including the last process id assigned to a process (on most systems), the three load averages, the current time, the number of existing processes, the number of processes in each state (sleeping, running, starting, zombies, and stopped), and a percentage of time spent in each of the processor states (user, nice, system, and idle). It also includes information about physical and virtual memory allocation.

The remainder of the screen displays information about individual pro-cesses. This display is similar in spirit to ps(1) but it is not
exactly the same. PID is the process id, USERNAME is the name of the process's owner (if -u is specified, a UID column will be substituted for USERNAME), PRI is the current priority of the process, NICE is the nice amount (in the range -20 to 20), SIZE is the total size of the process (text, data, and stack), RES is the current amount of resident memory (both SIZE and RES are given in kilobytes), STATE is the current state (one of "sleep", "WAIT", "run", "idl", "zomb", or "stop"), TIME is the number of system and user cpu seconds that the process has used, WCPU, when displayed, is the weighted cpu percentage (this is the same value that ps(1) displays as CPU), CPU is the raw percentage and is the field that is sorted to determine the order of the processes, and COM-MAND is the name of the command that the process is currently running (if the process is swapped out, this column is marked "<swapped>").