Top seems to have behavior unlike any other version of top I've used. I've one bug and one feature request. 1) Running top through rsh bogusly reports that TERM is set to VT100 - I note that strings shows that VT100 is a string in top. Other versions of top seem to show 24 lines of output in the situation where they are not connected to a tty. (Note, $TERM definitely doesn't contain VT100): 1:21:walton 71% rsh graves top top: Unknown terminal "VT100" in $TERM 1:21:walton 72% rsh graves echo $TERM xterm 2) When sending a signal top only allows you to give the number of one process, it would be nice to be able to give a list. Also it would be nice if you could give the signal number on the PID line, so you can do something like "k -9 3927 7320 9327".
*** Bug 7166 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
TERM is only set to VT100 if it is unset. It's a least-common-denominator guess, and is a feature, not a bug. Set TERM and the problem will go away. Regarding item 2, feel free to send a patch to procps-bugs for consideration. While the idea seems reasonable to me at first thought, I don't know if/when I'd get around to implementing it.
The traditional (and useful) behavior of top when TERM is unset is to do what one would now get with 'top b n 1' (which are, unfortunately, modern-Linux-top specific arguments, which makes them hard to use in portable shell scripts and in working habits which aren't Linux-exclusive).