Top is a great command when you are trying to see all of your running processes. It also gives a great deal of other information. It is broken down into four categories - tasks, cpu, mem, and swap. Tasks tells you about the processes that are running. Cpu tells you your processor load. Mem tells you about the total memory you have, how much is being used, and how much is free. Swap Is just like mem except it deals with your swap partition.

Below, you will see all the processes that are running on your computer. It gives most of the info about the processes that you will ever need to know. The main columns I focus on are PID, USER, %CPU, and %MEM. They are to me the most useful. PID is the process ID which is very useful when a program freezes. USER is who is running the program. %CPU is the amount of processing power the program is using. %MEM IS the amount of memory the program is taking up.

Top by itself only gives you information on what is running, but when you combine it with other commands, it makes it very powerful. We will get into that next time.