10.0 System Monitoring Utilities

A number of programs and mechanisms, some of which are presented here, can be used to examine the status of your system. Also described are some utilities that are useful for routine work, along with their most important parameters.

For each of the commands introduced, examples of the relevant outputs are presented. In these examples, the first line is the command itself (after the > or # sign prompt). Omissions are indicated with square brackets ([...]) and long lines are wrapped where necessary. Line breaks for long lines are indicated by a backslash (\).

# command -x -y
output line 1
output line 2
output line 3 is annoyingly long, so long that \
    we have to break it
output line 3
[...]
output line 98
output line 99

The descriptions have been kept short to allow as many utilities as possible to be mentioned. Further information for all the commands can be found in the man pages. Most of the commands also understand the parameter --help, which produces a brief list of the possible parameters.