Task manager

A task manager is a system monitor program used to provide information about the processes and programs running on a computer, as well as the general status of the computer. Some implementations can also be used to terminate processes and programs, as well as change the processes priority. In some environments, users can access a task manager by pressing the buttons Control-Alt-Delete.

Task managers can display currently running services (processes) as well as those that were stopped. They can display information about the services (such as Process ID and group) if known.

Common task managers

• Activity Monitor on Mac OS X (known as Process Viewer prior to Mac OS X v10.3)
• Anvir Task Manager, free and pro versions for Windows
• Conky on Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD; similar to GKrellM
• GKrellM on BSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X, and Windows; actually a system monitor (cannot kill processes, etc.)
• Gnome System Monitor on Linux systems with Gnome desktop
• htop, available for Linux systems
• KDE System Guard and KTop on KDE 3
• LxTask, the task manager of LXDE; also used by Puppy Linux
• nmon, short for Nigel's Monitor and there are ports to many CPU and O/S architectures
• nmon Analyser, an agnostic analyser for data created by nmon
• ps (Unix)
• qps, task manager for Linux systems with Qt graphical interface and a similar htop aesthetic
• Remote Task Monitor, for Linux, Windows CE devices
• tasklist for MS-DOS
• top (software) utility present in most Unix-like systems and the archetype after which others are modeled
• Windows Task Manager on Microsoft Windows