textANYprioritynice
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F7 or ]Requires appropriate permissions, typically root.
Htop Process Actions, Signals, and Priority Changes
Use htop to renice, kill, tag, and inspect processes, including shortcuts for signals, strace, lsof, and affinity-related workflows.
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Priority and signals
Interactive actions that change process behavior directly from htop.
textANYprioritynice
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F8 or [Useful when background jobs should yield more CPU to foreground work.
textANYkillsignal
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F9 or kChoose the signal interactively, such as TERM or KILL.
bashANYkillshellterm
bash
kill -TERM 12345TERM asks the process to exit cleanly before resorting to stronger signals.
bashANYreniceshell
bash
sudo renice -n -5 -p 12345Negative nice values increase scheduling priority.
textANYtagbulk-action
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Space to tag, U to untagTagged processes can be killed together from the signal menu.
Inspection tools
Attach external tools or inspect files and locks for the selected process.
textANYstracesyscalls
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sShows a live view of system calls for the selected process.
textANYlsoffiles
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lUseful for sockets, logs, deleted files still held open, and lock files.
textANYlocksdebugging
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xHelpful when debugging stuck jobs or lock contention.
bashANYstraceshellpid
bash
sudo strace -p 12345Helpful if you want to control strace flags more precisely than the in-app shortcut.
bashANYlsofshellpid
bash
sudo lsof -p 12345Pairs well with htop when you need copyable terminal output.
bashANYaffinitytaskset
bash
taskset -pc 12345Shows which CPU cores a process may run on.
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Htop Remote, Container, and Server Recipes
Common htop workflows for SSH sessions, containers, services, and production troubleshooting on Linux hosts.
Htop Config, Persistence, and Theming
Persist htop settings, edit configuration files, and manage practical theming and display preferences across sessions.
Htop Columns, Meters, Threads, and Display Options
Customize meters, visible columns, threads, kernel tasks, and display density for different monitoring scenarios.
Htop Navigation, Search, Filter, Sort, and Tree View
Interactive keys and workflows for moving around htop, searching processes, filtering by command, changing sort columns, and working in tree view.