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Difficulty: EasymacOS and Linux Operating System Features and Tools

A system administrator needs to inspect currently active processes and monitor system resource usage directly from a Linux or macOS terminal session. Which of the following terminal commands can be used to view process information? (Select TWO.)

  1. topAnswer
  2. psAnswer
  3. C
    df
  4. D
    grep

Answer

The correct commands for viewing running processes are top and ps.
The top command provides an interactive, real-time view of system resources and running processes, while the ps command generates a static snapshot list of currently running processes. Both commands natively serve to inspect process status in macOS and Linux terminal environments.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the administrative requirement.
The requirement is to list or monitor active system processes from the terminal interface.
Process management utilities in Unix-like systems (Linux and macOS) allow administrators to observe resource allocation and identify unresponsive applications.
2
Evaluate the candidate process monitoring tools.
The top tool provides interactive, real-time monitoring of active tasks, while the ps tool lists running processes in a static snapshot format.
Both top and ps are standard Unix CLI utilities designed specifically for viewing process information.
3
Differentiate from non-process utilities.
The df tool inspects free disk space on filesystems, and grep parses text streams for regular expressions.
These utilities fulfill storage and text processing roles rather than process enumeration.

Key Concept

Linux and macOS Process Monitoring Utilities
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Topics

macOS and Linux Operating System Features and Tools

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