Limit the output of the TOP command to a specific process name

Question

If you call the top command, you get all the running processes. But how can I limit the output only to a certain process name like "java"?

I've tried this top -l 2 | grep java but in this way you get only snapshots and not a continuously updated list. And top -l 0 | grep java is not really clear.

Answer 1

how about top -b | grep java

Answer 2

Use the watch command

watch -d 'top -n1 | grep mysql'

Answer 3

Find the pids of the processes you want to monitor and then use the -p option which allows you to provide a list of pids to the top command.

Example:

top -p 18884 -p 18892 -p 18919

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
18884 user  25   0  672M  95M  9476 S     0.0  1.1   0:02   1 java
18892 user  25   0 2280M 123M 12252 S     0.0  1.5   0:05   1 java
18919 user  22   0 1492M 198M 28708 S     0.0  2.4   0:07   1 java

(I believe you can also pass in a comma-separated list.)