How to get the memory usage of a OS X/macOS process

Question

In Ubuntu, /usr/bin/time -v any-command tells me the memory usage of any-command and some information. (Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/774601/2885946)

I want to do the same thing in OS X/macOS.

Could you tell me how to get the memory usage of a process on OS X like /usr/bin/time -v in Ubuntu?

Answer 1

You can use the Apple-supplied /usr/bin/time as follows without installing anything:

/usr/bin/time -l <DO SOMETHING>

It is important to use the full path /usr/bin/time because time calls bash and results in error: -bash: -l: command not found

Sample Output

0.04 real         
0.00 user
0.00 sys
   2830336  maximum resident set size       <-- peak memory usage
         0  average shared memory size
         0  average unshared data size
         0  average unshared stack size
       462  page reclaims
       253  page faults
         0  swaps
        13  block input operations
         3  block output operations
         0  messages sent
         0  messages received
         0  signals received
        26  voluntary context switches
        94  involuntary context switches

Answer 2

For me, the next command works great:

ps -axm -o %mem,rss,comm | grep <programm name>