How to obtain the virtual private memory of a process from the command line under OSX? - macos

Question

I would like to obtain the virtual private memory consumed by a process under OSX from the command line. This is the value that Activity Monitor reports in the "Virtual Mem" column. ps -o vsz reports the total address space available to the process and is therefore not useful.

Answer 1

You can obtain the virtual private memory use of a single process by running
top -l 1 -s 0 -i 1 -stats vprvt -pid PID
where PID is the process ID of the process you are interested in. This results in about a dozen lines of output ending with
VPRVT
55M+
So by parsing the last line of output, one can at least obtain the memory footprint in MB. I tested this on OSX 10.6.8.

Answer 2

update
I realized (after I got downvoted) that #user1389686 gave an answer in the comment section of the OP that was better than my paltry first attempt. What follows is based on user1389686's own answer. I cannot take credit for it -- I've just cleaned it up a bit.
original, edited with -stats vprvt
As Mahmoud Al-Qudsi mentioned, top does what you want. If PID 8631 is the process you want to examine:
$ top -l 1 -s 0 -stats vprvt -pid 8631
Processes: 84 total, 2 running, 82 sleeping, 378 threads
2012/07/14 02:42:05
Load Avg: 0.34, 0.15, 0.04
CPU usage: 15.38% user, 30.76% sys, 53.84% idle
SharedLibs: 4668K resident, 4220K data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 15160 total, 961M resident, 25M private, 520M shared.
PhysMem: 917M wired, 1207M active, 276M inactive, 2400M used, 5790M free.
VM: 171G vsize, 1039M framework vsize, 1523860(0) pageins, 811163(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 431147/140M in, 261381/59M out.
Disks: 487900/8547M read, 2784975/40G written.
VPRVT
8631
Here's how I get at this value using a bit of Ruby code:
# Return the virtual memory size of the current process
def virtual_private_memory
s = `top -l 1 -s 0 -stats vprvt -pid #{Process.pid}`.split($/).last
return nil unless s =~ /\A(\d*)([KMG])/
$1.to_i * case $2
when "K"
1000
when "M"
1000000
when "G"
1000000000
else
raise ArgumentError.new("unrecognized multiplier in #{f}")
end
end

Answer 3

Updated answer, thats work under Yosemite, from user1389686:
top -l 1 -s 0 -stats mem -pid PID