2.2. Viewing What's Currently Running

There are a number of ways to view what's currently running on your Mac, both from the command line and using graphical tools. We'll start with the handy GUI utility, Activity Monitor, and then show you how to view things programmatically for those times when you feel like getting your geek on with the commands ps and top from the command line.

NOTE

Before you can ps and top, you'll need to open a Terminal window (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).

2.2.1. The Activity Monitor

To view the processes running on your Mac (along with other information related to those processes), go to Applications, select Utilities, and open the Activity Monitor application, as shown in Figure 2-1. Activity Monitor will ...

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