Sort processes by start time

Question

Is there a way to view processes by the time they were started? top and htop have an option for sorting by how much time a process has been running, but I would like to sort by when the process began (most recent on top).

Answer 1

You can use something like this

while sleep 1;do ps -eo start_time,pid,euser,args:100 --sort start_time;done

This will list all processes running in order of start time although it will be latest at the bottom. The loop update every second, if you need a finer time period change the sleep as needed.

If you want the latest at the top you can pipe into tac

while sleep 1;do ps -eo start_time,pid,euser,args:100 --sort start_time | tac ;done

This will reverse the order.

From the comment above though i don't think listing in order of start time is what you really want.If you know the name of the process beforehand then you can use

while sleep 0.1;do ps -eo start_time,pid,euser,args:100 | grep YOURCOMMAND;done

To just check for that single commands start time and output nothing if it is not running.

Answer 2

I am using htop 2.2.0. Please try:

htop --delay=3 --sort-key=STARTTIME