CTOP(1)

📦 version 1.0.0, in ubuntu jammy

💖 CTOP(1) — the manual page, but make it a group chat 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're about to talk about ctop — the command line / text based Linux Containers monitoring tool. yes the whole page, no we're not skipping anything, let's go 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

ctop — command line / text based Linux Containers monitoring tool

✨ SYNOPSYS ✨

(yes it's spelled like that in the original, we don't fix what we didn't break 💅)

ctop [options]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea: ctop will help you see what's going on at the container level. and like, what even is a container? bestie, containers are a logical group of processes isolated using the kernel's cgroups and namespaces. they got super popular recently thanks to Docker, and they're also heavily used under the hood by systemd and a whole load of container tools like lxc, rocket, lmctfy and many others. it's giving ecosystem 🌈

under the hood, ctop will collect all the metrics it can from cgroups in realtime and render them to instantly give you an overview of the global system health. no cap, it's basically a vibe check for your whole machine 👑

right now it collects metrics related to cpu, memory and block IO usage, plus metadata like the owning user (mostly for systemd based containers), uptime, and it attempts to guess the container managing technology behind. she's nosy and we love that for her 💅

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -h, --help — show this help message and exit. the classic, the icon, the "help me i'm lost" button 🙈
  • --tree — show tree view by default. hierarchy! structure! main character energy 🌳
  • --refresh=REFRESH — Refresh display every <seconds>. pick your own heartbeat ⏱️
  • --follow=FOLLOW — Follow cgroup path. she's a stalker but make it monitoring 🦋
  • --fold=FOLD — Fold cgroup sub tree. tuck those branches away, we're being minimal today 🎀
  • --columns=COLUMNS — List of optional columns to display. Always includes 'name'. (the 'name' one is non-negotiable, she's the moment) ⭐
  • --sort-col=SORT_COL — Select column to sort by initially. Can be changed dynamically. so you sort once, then you sort again, then you sort again — it's a lifestyle 🔥

👑 AUTHOR 👑

This manual page was written by ChangZhuo Chen <czchen@debian.org> for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). shoutout to ChangZhuo, absolute legend, wrote the whole thing, we're obsessed 💜

okay and that's the whole page, fr fr, nothing left out, every flag accounted for 💖

and finally, the cutest part: this whole thing is dated 01/02/2021, and it lives under the name CTOP(1) — same as the header, same as the footer, a little full-circle moment. slay ✨🦋💅

📦 where this page comes from