The first column in your file, however, will always be the PID.Unlike other operating systems like Windows, Linux, or OSX, both Android and iOS operating systems are usually shipped with built-in user rights restrictions. For example, if the PID you search for also happens to be the number of MB of memory used by another process, you'll get additional lines of output. The right output will be in the file, but if the numeric PID matches any other lines, also, you'll get additional data. Warning: because you're using grep to search for the right PID, you may need to have your code that parses the log file validate its log input.

Note: you'll probably need to install grep from Cydia, also. You probably just want a single value, and then should let top exit. Using just top | grep 616 doesn't work, because it runs continuously. If you only need memory usage, though, you can probably use: > top -l 1 | grep 616 You need at least 2, because top calculates CPU% as a delta between samples, so with only 1 sample, it will always be 0%. It should give you what you need (in the second line of output). However, if you use this: > top -l 2 | grep 616 You will see, however, that the PID (-p) switch isn't supported in the version for jailbroken iOS. If you want to find out the proper command line switches for top, or anything else, try something like this: > top -help Can anyone show me how to print out the data just for one process? I've looked around, and it seems that the flags on the top for iphone are slightly different but I can't find a specific description. PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE PhysMem: 108M wired, 152M active, 39M inactive, 497M used, 519M free. MemRegions: num = 0, resident = 0 + 0 private, 0 shared.

SharedLibs: num = 0, resident = 0 code, 0 data, 0 linkedit. Then all I get is 616 printed off multiple times: Processes: 77 total, 1 running, 5 stuck, 71 sleeping. Unfortunately, when I run for PID 616: top -p 616 Then the data could be reclaimed at a later date and analysed.

My plan was to use top -p to filter out the rest of the processes and then pipe out the output to a log file. To do this I've jailbroken the iPhone and installed mobile terminal. It would help greatly if there was a stored log monitoring usage against time (ran periodically within the automated test). So I need to print out an individual iphone app's memory usage for a soak test.

Jailbroken iphone process monitor