Live View: top

While ps gives you a one-time snapshot, the top command shows a live, continuously updating view of processes, sorted by CPU or memory usage. It is the station engineer's dashboard.

In a full terminal you would simply type:

top

It takes over your screen and refreshes every few seconds. Press q to quit.

Since our sandbox does not have an interactive screen, you can get similar results with ps aux --sort:

ps aux --sort=-%cpu

USER       PID %CPU %MEM  ...  COMMAND
root        42  8.2  1.4  ...  /usr/bin/reactor-monitor --port=7700
root       305  1.1  0.8  ...  /usr/sbin/life-support
student   1201  0.0  0.2  ...  bash

The -%cpu means "sort by CPU, descending": the hungriest process appears first. You can also sort by memory: --sort=-%mem.

On a real station you would use top or its friendlier cousin htop to watch processes live. Here in the sandbox, ps aux --sort is your practical equivalent.

Mission: Runaway Process Hunt

The station's main computer is running hot and the bridge wants a written report on the culprit before the thermal alarms trigger.

List all processes sorted by CPU usage, highest first.
Capture the top of that sorted list (the header line plus the single hungriest process) into a file called top-offender.txt.
Create a folder called cpu-report and move top-offender.txt into it.
Display the saved file to confirm which program is the offender.

Expected result

cpu-report/top-offender.txt names /usr/bin/reactor-monitor as the biggest CPU consumer.