How to show the first line of `top` non interatively?

Question

top on Mac shows something like this on the top of the screen.

Processes: 1104 total, 187 running, 917 sleeping, 2761 threads 19:41:00

I don't want to run top interactively. Is there a way to run top noninteractive and just print this top line to the screen? Thanks.

Answer 1

Try this:

$ top -l1 | head -n1

From the man:

-l samples Use logging mode and display samples samples, even if standard output is a terminal. 0 is treated as infinity. Rather than redisplaying, output is periodically printed in raw form. Note that the first sample displayed will have an invalid %CPU displayed for each process, as it is calculated using the delta between samples.