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Sort Disk Read Write in Linux Iotop Command

Linux iotop command watches IO usage information output by the Linux kernel and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system. Let us learn how to sort disk read, disk write in iotop command.

Iotop command shows the process ID, user, the disk read, the disk write, the swap usage, the percent IO, and the command for each process. For detailed info about iotop, please check here.

Sort Columns in Iotop

  • Hit the left and right arrow keys to change the sorting.
  • Hit r to reverse the sorting order.
  • Hit o only to see processes or threads actually doing I/O, instead of showing all processes or threads.
  • Hit p only show processes. Normally iotop shows all threads.
  • Hit a display accumulated I/O instead of bandwidth. In this mode, iotop shows the amount of I/O processes have done since iotop started.
  • Hit i to change the priority of a thread or a process’ thread(s) i.e. ionice.
  • Hit q to quit iotop.

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Using Linux Iotop to check disk IO usage Per process