TOP
                         Version 3.2

                       William LeFebvre
		     and a cast of dozens


FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS AND THEIR ANSWERS

1. "We just upgraded our operating system to version 99.9.9.9 and top
   broke.  What should we do?"

   Recompile.  Top is very sensitive to changes in internal kernel data
   structures.  It is not uncommon for a new version of the operating
   system to include changes to kernel data structures.

2. "I tried compiling top under SunOS version 4.1.3 and it got compile
   time errors.  Is there a patch?"

   If you try compiling top in a "System V environment" under SunOS
   (that is, /usr/5bin is before /usr/bin on your path) then the 
   compilation will fail.  This is mostly due to the fact that top
   thinks its being compiled on a System V machine when it really isn't.
   The only solution is to put /usr/bin and /usr/ucb before /usr/5bin
   on your path and try again.

3. "Top is (not) displaying idle processes and I don't (do) want it to."

   This default has only changed about a dozen times, and I finally got
   tired of people whining about it.  Go read the manual page for version
   3.2 and pay special attention to the description of the "TOP" environment
   variable.

4. "We have so much memory in our machine that the memory status display
   (the fourth line) ends up being longer than 80 characters.  This
   completely messes up top's output.  Is there a patch?"

   No, but this will be fixed in version 3.2.  In the meantime, just
   take some of that memory out of your machine.  :-)

5. "When I run top on my SVR4-derived operating system, it displays all
   the system information at the top but does not display any process
   information.  Yet when I run it as root, everything works fine."

   Your system probably uses the pseudo file system "/proc", which is
   by default only accessible by root.  Top needs to be installed setuid
   root on such systems if it is going to function correctly for normal
   users.

6. "Configure said that it saw /proc and is recommending that I install
   top setuid root.  Is there any way around this?  Is it safe?"

   There is no way around it.  Complain to Posix.  Every effort has been
   made to make top a secure setuid program.  However, we cannot guarantee
   that there are no security problems associated with this configuration.
   The places where top is most vulnerable are the builtin kill and renice
   commands.  There is no internal top command that causes top to start
   a shell as a subprocess.

7. "Is there a module that will make top work under AIX?"

   Not at the current time.  Many people have started this project but
   none have yet to finish.  That may say something about the difficulty
   of the task......

8. "To whom do I report problems with top?"

   You can mail bug reports to "phil@eecs.nwu.edu".  If it looks like the
   problem is machine-specific, I will forward the report along to the
   module's author.  If you would like to converse directly with the
   module author, the authors' names are listed at the beginning of the
   module .c file in the "machine" directory.