Kaushal Shriyan wrote: > I did top -b > testcheck and did ctrl-c I could see that its not refreshed > > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 117K Aug 25 15:00 testcheck > [root@e test]# > > the size of the file testcheck doesnot increase Yes, that's what you've been told. When you press Ctrl-C, you kill top, and it stops adding anything to the testcheck file. Until you press Ctrl-C, top keeps sending output to testcheck. You may want to use the command top -b > testcheck & (the & is essential) which will put top "in the background" and return control to the shell without killing top. It would return a line something like [1] 7665 Later on, you could run kill 7665 to kill the job, or fg 1 to return it to the foreground. (CAUTION: obviously, you should use the numbers that the top ... & command returned!) (Dapper is a version of the Ubuntu operating system. No-one was suggesting that it would behave differently to Fedora in this regard). Hope this helps, James. -- New address: james | Legacy (adj): @aprilcottage.co.uk | an uncomplimentary computer-industry epithet that means | 'it works'. | -- Anthony DeBoer