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Bpytop command-line monitoring tool

Convenience

Article from ADMIN 66/2021

By Thorsten Scherf

The bpytop command-line monitoring tool provides a variety of information via a fancy user interface and supports network monitoring and mouse- or keyboard-based control.

Linux, as a multiuser operating system, can support a large number of active processes in each user session. To keep tabs on the resources consumed by individual users, all Linux distributions offer a wide variety of tools out of the box for monitoring processes, the CPU, and memory, including well-known utilities such as top [1]. If you are interested in what is happening on the network, you can choose IPTraf [2]; if you want more convenience and functionality, you can use Wireshark [3]. Even though some of these tools have a graphical counterpart, they all run as plain text applications on the command line. In some cases, the ncurses library provides a slightly more elegant interface for user interaction.

However, bpytop [4] takes a slightly different approach. As the name suggests, the tool is written in Python and offers a similar range of functions to the previously mentioned top. However, bpytop can also deliver information on network load, and it comes with all sorts of other interesting features. For example, you can control the tool either with the keyboard or the mouse. Different themes help you integrate the tool seamlessly with your own terminal environment.

When you hear the name bpytop, you might recall the also quite well-known bashtop [5] tool. In fact, both applications come from the same developer, but whereas bashtop relies completely on Bash scripting and therefore struggles with performance by definition, bpytop is written in Python. Of course, this results in far superior performance, which is immediately noticeable when you run the program. All of the

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