I am working on unix. I want to knwo the current cpu usage of a process. I understood that ps give the average of cpu used till the process is up - it is not the current usage. Is there a way to print only the cpu from the top command without 10 more parameters and headers? I know how to do it with awk - this is not the way i want to do it. top -p 20705 -bc -n 1 | tail -n 2 | awk '{ print $9}' | head -n 1 If there is another simple way to do it, not reading /proc/stat... If there is a simple way doing it from c++, it is also ok.