Verify main memory usage with linux command

Question

Is there any command that I could use to test memory usage for a single linux command? For example, I have a script file (test.sh) that will read and extract a word from a 100 MB text file. How could I find out how much memory this command (./test.sh input_file.txt) will make? Thanks for the tips there!

Answer 1

You can simply use top to see this. When you execute your script, a shell process such as bash will be created to execute the script for you. So, find the shell process at top and you will see how much memory it uses.

Answer 2

Use the free command to test RAM usage.

To check the size of the program in memory, you can check the file /proc/[pid]/statm . Read more about the format of this file man proc

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

Or you might want to see only the process memory with

watch -n0.5 ps u $PID

this will update the memory usage for your process every 0.5 seconds. If necessary, adjust the value for the update.