How to display only a process and its descendant processes on htop?
Under Linux, you can do:
htop -p `pstree -p $PID | perl -ne 'push @t, /\((\d+)\)/g; END { print join ",", @t }'`
where $PID is the root process. This works as follows:
- The list of the wanted processes are obtained with
pstree, using the-poption to list them with their PID. - The output is piped to a Perl script that retrieves the PID's, using a regular expression (here,
\((\d+)\)), and outputs them separated with commas. - This list is provided as an argument of
htop -p.
For other OS like Mac OS, you may need to adapt the regular expression that retrieves the PIDs.
Note: It is unfortunately not possible to update the list with new children that are spawn later, because once htop has been executed, one cannot do anything else. This is a limitation of htop (current version: 2.0.2).