System information

System Monitoring Utilities 9
System Monitoring Utilities
2
There are number of programs, tools, and utilities which you can use to examine the
status of your system. This chapter introduces some of them and describes their most
important and frequently used parameters.
For each of the described commands, examples of the relevant outputs are present-
ed. In the 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 4
[...]
output line 98
output line 99
The descriptions have been kept short so that we can include as many utilities as pos-
sible. Further information for all the commands can be found in the manual pages.
Most of the commands also understand the parameter --help, which produces a
brief list of possible parameters.
2.1 Multi-Purpose Tools
While most of the Linux system monitoring tools are specific to monitor a certain as-
pect of the system, there are a few “swiss army knife” tools showing various aspects