Check the main memory usage by a linux command [closed]

Question

Is there any command that I could use to check the memory usage for a single linux command? For instance I have a script file (test.sh) which will read and extract word from a 100mb text file. How could I know how much memory does this command (./test.sh input_file.txt) would take? Thanks for the advises there!!

Answer 1

Use the free command to check the usage of RAM.

To check the size of the program in memory you can check the /proc/[pid]/statm file. For details of the format of this file read man proc

Fetch the PID of the script from the script using the $$ variable (in bash).

EDIT

Other solutions:

ps u $PID | tail -n1 | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 5,6 Gives you the VMZ and RSS of the process with $PID.

Or may want to like to see only the process memory using

watch -n0.5 ps u $PID

this will update the usage of the memory for your process every 0.5 secs. Adjust the value for updating as required.

Answer 2

You can just use top to see that. When you execute your script, a shell process such as bash, will be create to execute the script for you. So, find the shell process in top and you can see how many memory it uses.