Strange top(1) output

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 18:26 +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> On 2005-05-10 10:41, Andre Guibert de Bruet <andy at siliconlandmark.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 10 May 2005, Skip Ford wrote:
> > > PID USERNAME       THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU
> > > COMM
> > >AND
> > >1352 skip             1  96    0 18968K 16276K select   0:21  0.00%  0.00%
> > >Xor
> > > 691 skip             1   8    0  4784K  3940K wait     0:08  0.00%  0.00%
> > > mut
> > > 684 skip             1  96    0  2336K  1948K select   0:07  0.00%  0.00%
> > > scr
> > > 667 root             1   4    0 24268K 23196K accept   0:06  0.00%  0.00%
> > > per
> > > 580 root             1  20    0 22896K 21948K pause    0:04  0.00%  0.00%
> > > per
> > > 447 root             1  96    0  2864K  1724K select   0:02  0.00%  0.00%
> > > ntp
> >
> > What is the length of the longest username that you have on your system?
> 
> Ah, yes!  Good thought.  This could affect the width of the USERNAME
> column and push everything too far to the right.  If this is the case,
> I'd probably vote for optionally limiting the length of the username
> column to, say, 8 columns at most.

I would also vote for limiting it to 8 characters.  Even with longer
usernames, I suspect 8 characters will be enough to identify particular
users (and if it's not there is always they UID view).

Doing this would also allow us to eliminate the nasty code in
src/usr.bin/top/machine.c which causes top to be unusable on a machine
with a significant number of user accounts.  See
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-April/014275.html
for details.

Gavin