I’ve recently picked up my copy of O’Reilly’s Learning UNIX for Mac OS X Panther again, and have been messing around a little bit with the command line.

Refreshing myself on a few basics left me feeling confident enough to try using Tynsoe.org’s GeekTool, an OS X system preference pane that allows you to display the output of terminal commands on the desktop. Tynsoe.org’s most recent update of GeekTool does not support OS X.4 Tiger (I’m up to date with 10.4.3), but an Italian developer has released a Tiger-optimized version.

With a little assistance from the Mac OS X Hints forums and Bryant Mairs’ Thrash the Swap weblog, I’ve now got GeekTool displaying my current CPU load as well as the 10 most CPU-intensive processes currently running. These displays refresh every 10 seconds, and show the PID, which thanks to the abovementioned book, I now know is quite important when it comes to managing tasks from the command line.