I'm trying to export the output of the "top" command (unix) with PHP. Invoking and reading the command/output is pretty simple using the "exex" function but the question is: is the "top" command output (order, names, etc.) always the same? Or is it related to the distribution I'm using?
Is there any way to parse these information "generally" on UNIX systems?
Thanks in advance
You could use ps instead, with arguments -A and -o like so:
ps -Ao %cpu,%mem,user,comm which would give you the output exactly like you specified when you called the command:
0.0 0.1 root udisks-daemon 0.0 0.0 root udisks-daemon 0.0 0.1 root gdm-simple-slav 11.0 0.4 root Xorg 0.0 0.1 root NetworkManager 0.0 0.1 root polkitd 0.0 0.1 root gdm3 Arguments:
-A Select all processes. -o format User-defined format. format is a single argument in the form of a blank-separated or comma-separated list, which offers a way to specify individual output columns. The recognized keywords are described in the STANDARD FORMAT SPECIFIERS section below. Headers may be renamed (ps -o pid,ruser=RealUser -o comm=Command) as desired. If all column headers are empty (ps -o pid= -o comm=) then the header line will not be output. Column width will increase as needed for wide headers; this may be used to widen up columns such as WCHAN (ps -o pid,wchan=WIDE- WCHAN-COLUMN -o comm). Explicit width control (ps opid, wchan:42,cmd) is offered too. The behavior of ps -o pid=X,comm=Y varies with personality; output may be one column named "X,comm=Y" or two columns named "X" and "Y". Use multiple -o options when in doubt. Use the PS_FORMAT environment variable to specify a default as desired; DefSysV and DefBSD are macros that may be used to choose the default UNIX or BSD columns. All STANDARD FORMAT SPECIFIERS that you could use, you can find in the man page of ps, but I've copied them also here for convenience:
As mentioned by Lucas, ps is probably printing what you would expect.
If your Unix flavour is Linux, I think pidstat (from the sysstat package) is better suited for your needs (not to mention, documented in a clearer way, in my opinion).