Question

I am trying to make a very simple shell script that frees up some memory space. For this, I am using command

$ ps xopmem o%c

to output a list of running processes with its percentual memory usage. Now, I want to filter out only those lines whose value (in the first field) is larger than, say 5.0. How can I do that? I preferably use SED.

P.S.: I Googled around this topic on the Internet but found nothing. Any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

sed cannot do numerical comparisons, you need to move one tool up, i.e. awk:

ps xopmem o%c | awk '$1 > 5.0'

That is, when the first field is greater than 5, execute the default block: { print $0 }.