Questions tagged [ps]

report a snapshot of the current processes. Useful when trying to determine the status of the running process in a specific moment.

114 questions
279
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What do the STAT column values in ps mean?

In the STAT column of ps there are a load of letters that don't really make much sense. What do they mean? Here's an example of ps aux | head: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.0 27176 …
Oli
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48
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4 answers

How to check my niceness?

Is there any way to check my nice lvl? I did try with ps, but for some reason the output does not show the column NI which is meant to show the lvl priority if I'm not wrong. ps -fl -c F S UID PID PPID CLS PRI ADDR SZ WCHAN STIME TTY …
sebas
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36
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3 answers

ps aux for long charactered usernames shows a plus sign

I'm trying to get an output from ps aux so that it looks like: giovanni 28331 4381 0 15:43 ? 00:00:00 sshd: giovanni@pts/1 giovanni 28346 28331 0 15:43 pts/1 00:00:00 -bash giovanni 28646 28346 0 15:43 pts/1 00:00:00…
26
votes
3 answers

How to prevent ps from truncating the process name

Following command outputs only first 25 characters of the process name (cmd) on the screen. How do I get it to display the full process name? ps -eo pid,cmd,etime
hvs
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23
votes
3 answers

Output only the column under COMMAND of `ps` command in terminal

I know that we can easily find the following: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND of all the running processes by using the command: sudo ps aux My, question is that, is it possible to show the output of only…
Raphael
  • 8,135
20
votes
5 answers

Find children of the process

is there any way to know, who are children of the specific process ? for example those children which their parent ID is foo ?
18
votes
1 answer

How to find the running network services and the port and user

I want to find a list of all network services running on my system, including details of the port and services and the users. I know that I need to use netstat, ps and fuser. but I don't know how to write the command. Do I need to write a shell…
17
votes
1 answer

What does "ps -ef|grep processname" mean?

I want to know exactly what this particular command ps -ef|grep processname means and how it works. I know that this should be associated with processname which we want to search for, but I don't get the prefix part; what do -ef and |(pipe) do and…
15
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4 answers

Why the PID values are not continuous?

If we type ps -ef then we get a list of processes. Why are the PID numbers not continuous?
14
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2 answers

List only processes that are in suspended mode

to list processes that are running in the background, one can type: ps -ef or ps -aux but how to list processes that are suspended, let's say I had some process in the foreground and just suspended (either with bg or Ctrl+z) how to I get to…
Algina
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14
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1 answer

what is the meaning of ax in ps ax

I know when you type sudo ps ax, that list all of the running process on the system. But want to know what is ax? what ax stand for? Is that abbreviation ?
12
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2 answers

Which to use of ps ef or ps -ef?

I see there is a difference in output between ps ef and ps -ef. What is that difference, are both commands correct or which is preferred?
12
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2 answers

Running a single executable with sudo adds two processes in process list

I wrote a program that captures the packets from the network interface. As it listens the network adapter, I need to run it with sudo. The question is, why when I run it, does it add two processes to the processes list? Note : lwdpi is my…
12
votes
1 answer

Difference between ps -aux and ps aux

What is the difference between ps -aux and ps aux? I wonder it's more than a mere matter of syntax and "portability". Which one is better to use in Ubuntu? Despite there are some similar question, I'm interested in this specific difference.
11
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2 answers

Values of WCHAN in ps

What does the WCHAN (waiting channel) mean exactly? what can be its value and what those values represents? I tried to find them but got nothing.
Chirag Acharya
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