Mastering htop: A Complete Guide to Real-Time Process Management on CentOS

When managing processes, tools like ps and top are common, but CentOS also provides a more powerful utility called htop . Below is a comprehensive tutorial on using this tool. 1. Install htop htop is available from the EPEL repository; configure EPEL or download the source package to install. 2. htop Interface Running htop opens a real‑time monitoring screen as shown in the image. The screen is divided into four areas: Upper‑left: CPU, physical memory, and swap usage. Upper‑right: task count, load average, and uptime. Process area: lists all current processes. Help area: shows shortcuts for F1‑F10. Key shortcuts: F1 – display help. F2 – configure displayed columns. F3 – process search. F4 – process filter. F5 – show process tree. F6 – sort columns. F7 – decrease nice value. F8 – increase nice value. F9 – kill selected process. F10 – exit htop. Additional shortcuts: Space – mark/unmark processes for batch actions. U – unmark all. s – show system calls of the selected process. l – list files opened by the selected process. I – reverse the current sort order. a – bind a process to a specific CPU. u – display processes of a specific user. M – sort by memory usage percentage (MEM%). P – sort by CPU usage percentage (CPU%). T – sort by process run time (TIME+). K – hide kernel threads. H – hide user threads. # – jump directly to a PID. 3. htop Command‑Line Options -d seconds – set refresh delay. -C – disable colors. -u user – show only processes of the specified user. -s column – sort by the given column.