How to install htop on CentOS 8/RHEL 8

Miroslav Micic

4 years ago

Htop is very interactive, gives you additional information about running processes, and allows for manipulations such as sorting the list of processes using various criteria and search for a process/kill processes. While top command takes few seconds delay to collect data where htop is much faster.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to install and use htop on CentOS 8/RHEL 8 Linux.

Advantages of htop over top include

Colored output resource usage statistics.
The ability to end or kill processes without typing their PIDs.
Htop allows mouse usage, unlike top which doesn’t support it.
Better performance than top command.

Let’s now jump in and see how to install this handy feature.

Install htop on CentOS 8

The first step in the installation of the Htop tool is to enable the EPEL repository. To do so, run:

# dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

After the installation of the EPEL repository, update the system.

# dnf update

To install htop tool, simply run the command:

# dnf install htop

After the installation is complete, you can find more information about htop using the command:

# dnf info htop

Example output:

# dnf info htop
Last metadata expiration check: 0:11:08 ago on Mon 23 Dec 2019 02:03:24 PM EST.
Installed Packages
Name         : htop
Version      : 2.2.0
Release      : 6.el8
Arch         : x86_64
Size         : 263 k
Source       : htop-2.2.0-6.el8.src.rpm
Repo         : @System
From repo    : epel
Summary      : Interactive process viewer
URL          : http://hisham.hm/htop/
License      : GPLv2+
Description  : htop is an interactive text-mode process viewer for Linux, similar to
             : top(1).

Using htop

To launch htop, simply run the command:

# htop

Here is what each column means:
PID: A process’s process ID number.
USER: The owner of the process.
PR: The process’s priority. The lower the number, the higher the priority.
NI: The nice value of the process, this affects its priority.
VIRT: The virtual memory the process is using.
RES: The physical RAM the process is using, usually measured in kilobytes.
SHR: The shared memory the process is using.
S: The current status of the process (sleeping, zombied, running, traced or uninterruptedly sleeping).
%CPU: The percentage of the processor time used by the process. It displays the % of CPU used at the end of the bar. The bar itself will shows low-priority in blue, normal in green, kernel in red.
%MEM: The percentage of physical RAM used by the process.
TIME+: The processor time the process has used.
COMMAND: The name of the command that initiated the process.
The footer displays the htop menu commands.
To get help with the command usage, simply run:

# htop --help

]# htop --help
htop 2.2.0 - (C) 2004-2019 Hisham Muhammad
Released under the GNU GPL.

-C --no-color               Use a monochrome color scheme
-d --delay=DELAY            Set the delay between updates, in tenths of seconds
-h --help                   Print this help screen
-s --sort-key=COLUMN        Sort by COLUMN (try --sort-key=help for a list)
-t --tree                   Show the tree view by default
-u --user=USERNAME          Show only processes of a given user
-p --pid=PID,[,PID,PID...]  Show only the given PIDs
-v --version                Print version info

Long options may be passed with a single dash.

Press F1 inside htop for online help.
See 'man htop' for more information.

Alternatively, you can view the man pages by running:

# man htop

Conclusion

This page showed you how to install and use htop on CentOS 8 Linux. If you have any questions or feedback, do share it with us in the comment section below.