top: counting the number of processes belonging to a user

Question

Is there way of counting the number of processes being run by a user in the unix/linux/os x terminal?

For instance, top -u taha lists my processes. I want to be able to count these.

Answer 1

This will show all of the users with their counts (I believe this would be close enough for you. :)

ps -u "$(echo $(w -h | cut -d ' ' -f1 | sort -u))" o user= | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Answer 2

You can use ps to output it and count the number using wc, as:

ps -u user | sed 1d | wc -l

You can also dump top output and grep it, something like:

top -u user -n1 | grep user | wc -l