Shell Programming and Scripting

tx for the suggestion, however it doesn't seam to work. I tried the following

echo | top -n 1
echo | top
echo 1 | top -n 1
echo 1 | top

all those produce the same error output "top: failed tty get"

Any ideas ?

i have never seen that error message before. No idea why it is happening. Try echo | format and see if that works. If it does, then there may be some other issue specific to running it with top on your system.

I have never had any problems echoing out top or other similar commands.

try the echo | format and see what happens.