Linux Ask!

Linux Ask! is a Q & A web site specific for Linux related questions. Questions are collected, answered and audited by experienced Linux users.

Dec 152010
 

What are the difference between tail -f and tail -F?

Answer:

Basically these two command are very similar, except tail -F do one more thing: the retry.

This is useful when you are tailing a web server log, e.g. apache log. When the the log file got rotated, the tail -F will continue to work since it will retry for the rotated file, while tail -f can't.

Dec 142010
 

Display the top 10 processes used up the most of the memory

Answer:

The following command display the most top 10 processes used up the most of the memory in your Linux system.

Example:

# ps aux | sort -nk +4 | tail

www-data 27972  0.0  2.8 253896 14916 ?        S    13:10   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 27725  0.0  2.9 254028 15572 ?        S    12:52   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 27912  0.0  2.9 253896 15660 ?        S    13:06   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 27946  0.0  2.9 253764 15492 ?        S    13:08   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root      2710  0.0  3.1 252996 16444 ?        Ss   Dec08   1:20 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 27885  0.0  3.4 253508 18152 ?        S    13:05   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 27892  0.1  6.7 261748 35472 ?        S    13:06   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 27975  0.3  7.0 263036 37128 ?        S    13:10   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 27964  0.7  8.2 268532 43452 ?        S    13:09   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
mysql     2480  0.4  8.7 223920 46096 ?        Sl   Dec08  21:07 /usr/sbin/mysqld 

Since the apache2 was configured to run in the prefork mode, so you see multiple apache processes there.