Bashtop – A Resource Monitoring Tool for Linux

Bashtop is a terminal-based resource monitoring utility in Linux. It’s a nifty command-line tool that intuitively displays statistics for your CPU, memory, running processes, and bandwidth to mention just a few.

It ships with a game-inspired and responsive terminal UI with a customizable menu. Monitoring various system metrics is made easy by the neat arrangement of various display sections.

With Bashtop, you can also sort processes, as well as easily switch between the various sorting options. Additionally, you can send SIGKILL, SIGTERM, and SIGINT to the processes that you want.

Bashtop can be installed on both Linux, macOS, and even FreeBSD. In this guide, you will learn how to install Bashtop on various Linux distributions.

Prerequisites

To successfully install Bashtop, ensure that you have the following dependencies ready in your system.

• Bash 4.4 or later versions
• Git
• GNU Coreutils
• GNU sed, awk, grep and ps command-line tools.
• Lm-sensors – optional – (For gathering CPU temperature statistics).

Installing Bashtop Resource Monitor on Linux

To get started, we will begin with the manual installation of Bashtop. This should work across all distributions:

Manual Installation

To manually install Bashtop, clone the git repository as shown and compile from source using the commands below:

$ git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop.git
$ cd bashtop
$ sudo make install

To uninstall Bashtop, run:

$ sudo make uninstall

Install Bashtop in Ubuntu

There are 2 ways of installing Bashtop on Ubuntu: using snap or using the APT package manager.

To install using snap, execute:

$ snap install bashtop

To install using the APT package manager, first append the Bashtop PPA as shown:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bashtop-monitor/bashtop

Next, update the package list and install Bashtop as shown.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install bashtop

Install Bashtop in Debian

Bashtop is available in Debian’s official repository. To install it, simply run the command:

$ sudo apt install bashtop

Also, you can run the commands shown.

$ git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop.git
$ cd bashtop/
$ cd DEB
$ sudo ./build

Install Bashtop in Fedora

To get Bashtop into Fedora, simply run the command:

$ sudo dnf install bashtop

Install Bashtop in CentOS/RHEL 8

For CentOS 8 / RHEL 8 systems, you need to first enable the EPEL repository and later run the command below:

$ sudo yum install epel-release
$ sudo dnf install bashtop

Install Bashtop on Arch Linux

Bashtop is available in AUR as bashtop-git. To install Bashtop, simply run:

$ sudo pacman -S bashtop

How to Use Bashtop Resource Monitor on Linux

To launch Bashtop, simply run the command below on the terminal.

$ bashtop

Bashtop Configuration

Bashtop’s configuration file is found at ~/.config/bashtop/bashtop.cfg location. You can change the parameters as you deem fit to customize the appearance and output of metrics on the terminal.

Here’s a sample of the default configuration:

To have a peek at the commands & shortcuts, press the ESC key and then select the ‘HELP’ option using the arrow down key.

This prints out the menu below with all the command options as shown.

Conclusion

Generally, Bashtop provides an excellent way of keeping an eye on your Linux system resources. However, it’s much slower than top and htop and is a bit resource-intensive. Nevertheless, it’s quite an impressive tool that provides salient information about various system metrics. Give it a try and let us know how it went.