Which command would you use to identify the current top CPU-consuming process in real time?

• A. top
• B. ps aux | sort -nrk 3
• C. vmstat 1
• D. htop

Answer: (A)

In real-time process monitoring, you want a tool that continuously refreshes the list of running processes and shows which one is using the most CPU. The top command does that by running in an interactive mode and updating the display at a regular interval, with the processes typically sorted so the highest CPU consumer appears at the top. You can interact with it to sort by different metrics or to manage processes, which makes it the quickest, most reliable way to spot the current top CPU user as it changes.

Ps with a one-time sort would only give a snapshot, not ongoing updates. Vmstat provides overall system statistics, not per-process details. While another tool like htop offers similar real-time insight with a more modern interface, top is the standard baseline available on virtually all systems.