awaken top and following receipt of any input the entire display will be repainted. They also force an update of any hotplugged cpu or physical memory changes.
Use either of these keys if you have a large delay interval and wish to see current status,
? | h :Help
There are two help levels available. The first will provide a reminder of all the basic interactive commands. If top is secured, that screen will be abbreviated.
Typing ‘h’ or ‘?’ on that help screen will take you to help for those interactive commands applicable to alternate-display mode.
= :Exit‐Display‐Limits
Removes restrictions on what is shown. This command will reverse any ‘i’ (idle tasks), ‘n’ (max tasks), ‘v’ (hide children) and ‘F’ focus commands that might be active. It also provides for an exit from PID
monitoring, User filtering, Other filtering, Locate processing and Combine Cpus mode.
Additionally, if the window has been scrolled it will be reset with this command.
0 :Zero‐Suppress toggle
This command determines whether zeros are shown or suppressed for many of the fields in a task window. Fields like UID, GID, NI, PR or P are not affected by this toggle.
A :Alternate‐Display‐Mode toggle
This command will switch between full-screen mode and alternate-display mode. See topic 5. ALTERNATE-DISPLAY Provisions and the ‘g’ interactive command for insight into ‘current’ windows and field groups.
B :Bold‐Disable/Enable toggle
This command will influence use of the bold terminfo capability and alters both the summary area and task area for the ‘current’ window. While it is intended primarily for use with dumb terminals, it can be
applied anytime.
Note: When this toggle is On and top is operating in monochrome mode, the entire display will appear as normal text. Thus, unless the ‘x’ and/or ‘y’ toggles are using reverse for emphasis, there will be no
visual confirmation that they are even on.
* d | s :Change‐Delay‐Time‐interval
You will be prompted to enter the delay time, in seconds, between display updates.
Fractional seconds are honored, but a negative number is not allowed. Entering 0 causes (nearly) continuous updates, with an unsatisfactory display as the system and tty driver try to keep up with top’s
demands. The delay value is inversely proportional to system loading, so set it with care.
If at any time you wish to know the current delay time, simply ask for help and view the system summary on the second line.
E :Enforce‐Summary‐Memory‐Scale in Summary Area
With this command you can cycle through the available summary area memory scaling which ranges from KiB (kibibytes or 1,024 bytes) through EiB (exbibytes or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes).
If you see a ‘+’ between a displayed number and the following label, it means that top was forced to truncate some portion of that number. By raising the scaling factor, such truncation can be avoided.
e :Enforce‐Task‐Memory‐Scale in Task Area
With this command you can cycle through the available task area memory scaling which ranges from KiB (kibibytes or 1,024 bytes) through PiB (pebibytes or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes).
While top will try to honor the selected target range, additional scaling might still be necessary in order to accommodate current values. If you wish to see a more homogeneous result in the memory columns,
raising the scaling range will usually accomplish that goal. Raising it too high, however, is likely to produce an all zero result which cannot be suppressed with the ‘0’ interactive command.
g :Choose‐Another‐Window/Field‐Group
You will be prompted