wok view ftop/description.txt @ rev 25446
ftop: add description.txt
| author | Pascal Bellard <pascal.bellard@slitaz.org> |
|---|---|
| date | Tue Sep 06 10:22:54 2022 +0000 (20 months ago) |
| parents | |
| children |
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1 Ftop is to files what top is to processes. The progress of all open files and
2 file systems can be monitored. If run as a regular user, the set of open files
3 will be limited to those in that user's processes (which is generally all that
4 is of interest to the user). In any case, the selection of which files to
5 display is possible through a wide assortment of options. As with top, the
6 items are displayed in order from most to least active.
8 The interface extends beyond the traditional capabilities and expectations of
9 console applications. For instance, ftop supports two output modes, full (using
10 ncurses) and limited (simple plain text). The output mode can be specified at
11 invocation, or changed dynamically as the program runs. Limited output mode is
12 well suited for piping into other utilities (such as grep or sed) or simply for
13 redirecting into a file. Full output mode is much more visually appealing and
14 contains a few more features. Keyboard control and interaction is not limited
15 to full output mode; it is also available in limited output mode.
17 As another unique usability feature, the command line options for ftop exactly
18 match the run-time keyboard commands. In other words, the '-p' command line
19 option can be used to specify a list of processes at invocation, and while ftop
20 is running, 'p' can be pressed to modify the list. As another example, '-h'
21 will show the help screen when ftop starts, or 'h' can be pressed at any time
22 afterward to show the help screen. This commonality exists for every
23 configuration option. And the current value for all options can be viewed at a
24 glance in the options screen.
26 Finally, ftop can also be easily configured to display additional files that
27 are not currently open by any local processes, and file system usage. If an NFS
28 client is writing a file on a local export, that file may not be open by any
29 local process, so the additional files feature is used to display those files.
30 One or more file systems can be monitored if many files are being created, for
31 instance while restoring from a backup or extracting a large archive.
33 Ftop has many more features than those described here. Detailed online help
34 describes all available functionality, and provides examples of some of the
35 interesting ways in which ftop can be used.
37 Ftop currently makes use of the entries for each process in /proc/PID/fdinfo/
38 to determine the file position and other details.