Running this command tells the JVM to take a "heap dump snapshot" and save it to a file for processing, usually using the jhat utility (which I introduced in a previous article).

For complete flexibility, in Unix-like systems with a popen function, you can pre-process the file with text processing utilities before it is passed into the plot command.

Many of the previous Speaking UNIX columns (see Resources) have presented the find command — an invaluable utility for scanning and processing files or even the entire UNIX file system.