Chris Turner wrote:
top's "this terminal can only display N processes" gets on my nerves.
Ok - so the top(1) saga continues. Digging around, and meditating on it a bit, the following is clear - 1) top was made when fast computers were slow 2) top was made for serial terminals (duh) So - some assumptions for that: 1) scanning the process table is slow. 2) redrawing the terminal is slow therefore: 1) only rewrite the needed / changed lines to the screen 2) Keeping #1 in mind, don't display more than the terminal can display, else the terminal become an endlessly scrolling nightmare of uninterruptable top output (kind of like running 'find / |xargs cat' on a 9600 baud vax tty) 3) The number of processes displayed w/r/t the screen is important 4) And only display what is needed / asked for. as a result: 1) top does not display more than the default number of processes unless requested to do so. Someone had asked this previously - to show more, run e.g: top 100 DOH! arty-effem! silly me. it is the 'show the top N programs program' not 'fill my screen with program stuff program'. Like the top-10 Radio Countdown WOOHOO. With Casey Casem. or you can fill the screen with program stuff by running 'top -a' or if you prefer apropos to man -k : by running 'top all'. 2) top will provide a highly annoying warning when not able to view the expected number of processes in conclusion, I suggest: 1) re-enabling the annoying top warning message, and perhaps choosing a sensible default to prevent the annoying warning on a handy-dandy default punched-card sized 80x24 display this would mean changing DEFAULT_TOPN in /usr/src/usr.bin/top/config.h to 17. (24 - 7 for the 'header' stuff) fun. comments? - Chris p.s: did you know you can setup TOPCOLORS to configure colorful alert thresholds as well? nifty.
