How to force 'top' to show human readable values for %MEM RES and VIRT

Question

How can I configure 'top' to show all values in human readable format instead of long numerics. I am using Ubuntu 14.04.

Sample output I am getting at the moment:

top - 11:39:56 up 14:46, 11 users,  load average: 1.14, 1.61, 1.35
Tasks: 248 total,   2 running, 246 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  3.5 us,  1.4 sy,  0.1 ni, 93.3 id,  1.2 wa,  0.5 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   8040568 total,  7814164 used,   226404 free,   155912 buffers
KiB Swap:  8249340 total,   208240 used,  8041100 free.  4688852 cached Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                      
 7106 pavan     20   0 1439336  58244  17120 S   2.7  0.7  11:12.32 compiz                                                                       
19358 pavan     20   0  685616  27460  11568 S   2.7  0.3   0:52.53 gnome-terminal                                                               
 1011 root      20   0  328568  37232  22796 S   2.0  0.5   5:30.76 Xorg                                                                         
 8879 pavan     20   0  895572 144464  13112 S   2.0  1.8   2:42.05 chrome                                                                       
 7135 pavan     20   0  422640   8956   6436 S   1.7  0.1   4:38.53 indicator-multi                                                              
 8842 pavan     20   0 1113460  62956  14084 S   1.3  0.8   5:20.84 chrome                                                                       
 6879 pavan     20   0  524448  45100  10440 S   1.0  0.6   3:18.77 unity-panel-ser                                                              
 8060 pavan     20   0 1107068 171568  52644 S   1.0  2.1  13:41.37 chrome

muru · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-11T06:35:38.250

30

If you press h, the help screen contains, among other things:

  Z,B,E,e   Global: 'Z' colors; 'B' bold; 'E'/'e' summary/task memory scale

Pressing e cycles through mega, giga, tera and peta-sized figures (and the default suffixless kilobyte) values.

After selecting the size, press W to have top save your preferences to ~/.toprc. Now it should start with the preferred size.

edited Sep 11 '14 at 06:35

answered Sep 11 '14 at 06:25

muru

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That worked, thanks. Is there anyway I can force top to show human readable numbers by default? – kn_pavan Sep 11 '14 at 06:33
and in earlier releases, like 12.04? – mirkobrankovic Oct 13 '16 at 07:30
@mirkobrankovic tough luck, I guess. The manpage doesn't mention the e command, and it doesn't look like you have other ways. – muru Oct 14 '16 at 05:15
1

yeah, i saw man page, i guess htop will be handy there on 12.04 – mirkobrankovic Oct 14 '16 at 07:27
1

@kn_pavan use W to save the .toprc configuration – Eric Kigathi Aug 05 '19 at 17:08
Unfortunately these aren't "human units," at least in the sense of free -h which automatically selects the best unit based on the magnitude of the number. (e.g. one app might be 500 MiB while another is 1.5 GiB) Everything gets expressed in the same unit, which is inconvenient. – hackel Oct 17 '19 at 20:21
FWIW, tops help screen is nearly impossible to parse. – Josh M. Nov 08 '23 at 16:42

How to force 'top' to show human readable values for %MEM RES and VIRT

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