How can I find a specific process with “top” in a Mac terminal

Question

I\'ve tried top | grep skype for example but it doesn\'t work. I\'m trying to find a specific process by name.

Answer 1

On Linux, the top command supports the -p option to monitor specific PIDs. On MacOS, the -p option is called -pid instead.

# Get the PID of the process
pgrep Skype

# Then
top -pid 

# Or more succinctly:
top -pid `pgrep Skype`

If you do this a lot, you could turn this into a function and add it to ~/.bash_profile:

# Add this to ~/.bash_profile
function topgrep() {
    if [[ $# -ne 1 ]]; then 
        echo "Usage: topgrep "
    else 
        top -pid `pgrep $1`
    fi
}

Now you can simply use topgrep Skype instead, which will run like usual but it will only show the process(es) matching expression.