htop output to human readable file

Question

I've tried piping htop to a text file (e.g. htop > text.txt) but it gives me text garbled by formatting strings (see below). Is there a way to get nicer, human readable output?

^[7^[[?47h^[[1;30r^[[m^[[4l^[[?1h^[=^[[m^[[?1000h^[[m^[[m^[[H^[[2J^[[1B  ^[[36m1  ^[[m^[[1m[^[[m^[[32m||||||||||^[[31m||||||||||^[[30m^[[1m                                                            \
     22.2%^[[m]^[[m     ^[[36mTasks: ^[[1m159^[[m^[[36m total, ^[[32m^[[1m5^[[m^[[36m running^[[3;3H2  ^[[m^[[1m[^[[30m                                                                                \
      0.0%^[[m]^[[m     ^[[36mLoad average: ^[[30m^[[1m1.11 ^[[m^[[m1.28 ^[[1m1.31 ^[[4;3H^[[m^[[36m3  ^[[m^[[1m[^[[m^[[32m||||||||||^[[30m^[[1m                                                       \
                    11.1%^[[m]^[[m     ^[[36mUptime: ^[[1m9 days, 22:04:51^[[5;3H^[[m^[[36m4  ^[[m^[[1m[^[[30m                                                                                      0.0\
%^[[m]^[[6;3H^[[m^[[36m5  ^[[m^[[1m[^[[m^[[31m||||||||||^[[30m^[[1m                                                                           11.1%^[[m]^[[7;3H^[[m^[[36m6  ^[[m^[[1m[^[[30m           \

Answer 1

htop author here.

No, there's no "nice" way to get the output of htop piped into a file. It is an interactive application and uses terminal redraw routines to produce its interface (therefore, piping it makes as much sense as, for example, piping vim into a text file -- you'll get similar results).

To get the information about your processes in a text format, use "ps". For example, ps auxf > file.txt gives you lots of easy to parse information (or ps aux if you do not wish tree-formatting -- see man ps for more options).

Answer 2

htop outputs ANSI escape code to use colors and move the cursor around the terminal. There is a great command line program aha that can be used to convert ANSI into HTML.

Ubuntu/Debian installation

apt-get install aha

Save htop output as HTML file

echo q | htop | aha --black --line-fix > htop.html

Answer 3

I have had the same need, and ended up using top instead of htop a is provides a batch mode via the -b flag.

-b : Batch mode operation Starts top in 'Batch mode', which could be useful for sending output from top to other programs or to a file. In this mode, top will not accept input and runs until the iterations limit you've set with the '-n' command-line option or until killed.

So for example:

top -b -n 1

Hope this helps even if this is not using htop.

Answer 4

This command outputs plain text. (It requires installing aha and html2text.)

echo q | htop -C | aha --line-fix | html2text -width 999 | 
grep -v "F1Help\|xml version=" > file.txt

Answer 5

You can also use script prior to running htop in a mode that will redirect timings to a file for later playback. In the realm of 'yet another work around' and 'good for show and tell'.

script -t -a /var/tmp/script.htop.out 2> /var/tmp/script.htop.out.timings
htop 

Then to playback

scriptreplay /var/tmp/script.htop.out.timings /var/tmp/script.htop.out

Answer 6

Install recode first, then encode it to utf-8:

$htop | recode utf-8 > test.txt

Then cat the file and you should be good.

Answer 7

This may sound really noobish, however, if you have multiple monitors you could have htop running while "record my desktop" is capturing that area. Its more of a video and may not help with searching and sorting but it would look nice and pretty.