Thanks for going through the effort to try it out! I figured that a proc monitor was doing some kernel leve stuff and wouldn't compile on a foreign kernel, so I didn't even try. By "port... foe the Mac" I meant simply port, not MacPort. I live two totally isolated lives on my Mac. In my professional life I do everything from a shell. Give me iTerm, ssh, scp, vim, (Gnu) screen, and mysql, and I'm happy. In my personal life I like the ooey GUI benefits of the Mac, for photo and video management, etc. So, for anyone else out there, I'm still looking for a good "top" app. On 8/20/07, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign@macports.org> wrote:

On Aug 19, 2007, at 22:59, Richard Bronosky wrote:

...

The top program on Linux is interactive and extremely useful. I find the one on the Mac to be quiet painful to use in comparison.

There doesn't seem to be an port of http://htop.sourceforge.net/ for the Mac.

Please advise.

If you mean there is no MacPorts port of htop, this is because htop does not appear to work on Mac OS X. Their web site does not seem to mention Mac OS X compatibility, and running ./configure says:

configure: error: Cannot find /proc/stat. Make sure you have a Linux- compatible /proc filesystem mounted. See the file README for help.

And Mac OS X does not have a /proc filesystem.

You could ask the authors of htop if they could make it work on Mac OS X, but I suspect it would require significant work on their part.

I don't have very high demands on top, so Mac OS X's top suits me fine. There's also Activity Monitor in /Applications/Utilities which can be useful and informative.

-- .!# RichardBronosky #!.

On Aug 20, 2007, at 5:38 AM, Richard Bronosky wrote:

Thanks for going through the effort to try it out! I figured that a proc monitor was doing some kernel leve stuff and wouldn't compile on a foreign kernel, so I didn't even try. By "port... foe the Mac" I meant simply port, not MacPort.

I live two totally isolated lives on my Mac. In my professional life I do everything from a shell. Give me iTerm, ssh, scp, vim, (Gnu) screen, and mysql, and I'm happy. In my personal life I like the ooey GUI benefits of the Mac, for photo and video management, etc.

So, for anyone else out there, I'm still looking for a good "top" app.

I think it's reasonably fair to say that this simply does not exist, though writing one would probably occupy less than a month or two, so we're not talking about erecting the great pyramid here. I also don't think it's really even worth exploring a port of Linux's htop unless you just want to steal the front end of it and rewrite everything else. The statistics gathering methodology is just too different on the two platforms. Linux uses procfs, as you've already determined, and Mac OS X uses a combination of sysctls, private API and .. other stuff .. for grabbing information out of Mach and the variety of other places we've squirreled it. It's been on my TODO list for awhile to truly abstract all of this out (we made a few half-hearted attempts with libtop and libproc, but they never got advanced to the actual API stage and still have holes in their coverage) but I need a really motivated intern or something... That's not to say "you can't get there from here", it's just more difficult than it needs to be. Good luck. :) - Jordan

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 07:37:15AM -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

I also don't think it's really even worth exploring a port of Linux's htop unless you just want to steal the front end of it and rewrite everything else. The statistics gathering methodology is just too different on the two platforms. Linux uses procfs, as you've already determined, and Mac OS X uses a combination of sysctls, private API and .. other stuff .. for grabbing information out of Mach and the variety of other places we've squirreled it.

That's my experience as well. A year back or so, when I had too much time on my hands, I tried myself at top. I found I had to poke in various strange places to gather all process info, and that some fields exist in one OS but not the other. I am not sure what would be easier: re-write the bottom layer of htop, or add interactivity to Mac OS X's top. A.