When someone at a conference discovered that I was the original author for the utility "top" the reaction is always the same: "hey that's a really cool program", "thanks for writing it", or "top really saved the day". I am glad that in my own little way I was able to contribute to the system administrator's toolbox. But for years I have been unable to do much additional work with top, and it has become rather out of date. I was able to keep up with some of the operating system changes, but I have not really been able to add useful features to it or to track the seemingly endless variations that others have implemented.

Recently I have been trying to put more effort in to maintaining and improving the program. It now has its own website, http://www.unixtop.org. It is now a sourceforge project (named "unixtop"). I am now using Subversion for revision control and I am periodically mirroring my subversion commits to the repository on sourceforge. I have been developing the groundwork for a new major release of top and if I am able to implement my vision it will be infinitely more useful than it is now. But in the meantime I am trying to make some much needed incremental improvements to version 3, and I would enjoy sharing these efforts with the community through this blog. I would also like to get some feedback from its users about a few significant changes I am planning to make to the next minor release. System administrators will benefit the most from any work I put in to top, so I felt it would be best to tap in to the community. And what better place to do that than here?

So please check my blog here periodically as I try to post information about the work I am doing. And if you are interested in testing those changes as I go, the easiest thing for you to do is to get the most recent code via subversion with

svn checkout https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/unixtop/trunk

Thanks for reading!

Bill

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