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Questions tagged [ps]

ps is a Unix operating system command and the like used to display the running processes.

143 questions
283
votes
3 answers

ps aux output meaning

When typing the command ps aux, what does each column of the output mean? For example: $ ps aux timothy 29217 0.0 0.0 11916 4560 pts/21 S+ 08:15 0:00 pine root 29505 0.0 0.0 38196 2728 ? Ss Mar07 0:00 sshd: can [priv] …
Tim
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161
votes
8 answers

How can I know the absolute path of a running process?

If I have multiple copies of the same application on the disk, and only one is running, as I can see with ps, how can I know the absolute path to distinguish it from the others?
Jader Dias
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76
votes
2 answers

Is "ps -u" Really a Bad Syntax?

IMHO ps -u shows a very useful output, much better than ps -u $USER: $ ps -u Warning: bad syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See /usr/share/doc/procps-3.2.8/FAQ USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND elastic 234897 …
sjngm
  • 2,143
72
votes
15 answers

ps: How can i recursively get all child process for a given pid

How can I get the entire process tree spawned by a given process displayed as a tree and only that tree i.e. no other processes? The output could e.g. look like 4378 ? Ss 0:10 SCREEN 4897 pts/16 Ss 0:00 \_ -/bin/bash 25667 pts/16…
kynan
  • 3,586
52
votes
1 answer

In UNIX, what are the Ss, Sl, and Ssl proccess types I see with ps aux?

When doing a ps aux command, I see some process listed as Ss, Ssl and Sl. What do these mean? root 24653 0.0 0.0 2256 8 ? Ss Apr12 0:00 /bin/bash -c /usr/bin/python /var/python/report_watchman.py root 24654 0.0 0.0 …
JiminyCricket
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30
votes
7 answers

Excluding grep from process list

I have cobbled together a command to return the process ID of a running daemon: ps aux | grep daemon_name | awk "{ print \$2 }" It works perfectly and returns the PID, but it also returns a second PID which is presumably the process I'm running…
tak
  • 303
27
votes
4 answers

Is it possible to format ps RSS (memory) output to be more human friendly?

Executing ps ux returns a nice list of process information, easy to grep through or watch. However, there doesn't seem to be much flexibility in the memory usage output; the RSS (resident set size) is printed in kB, which for large processes is hard…
metasoarous
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23
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4 answers

How to get only the user, the pid and the command run for a specific process? (Ubuntu 11.10)

When I do ps -ef|grep python I get the following: myusername 4492 2994 0 10:32 pts/0 00:00:01 /home/myusername/.virtualenvs/myproject/bin/ipython manage.py runserver root 6665 1 0 10:42 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/python…
Bentley4
  • 1,998
20
votes
4 answers

How to list a process tree on Windows?

I know in Linux it's very useful the pstree command and something like that is what I'm looking for... but how to make a detailed process list (tree) on Windows terminal?
AAlvz
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17
votes
4 answers

Is it possible to 'hide' a process from the listing of `ps` or `top` on Linux

First, I presume that if this is possible it would need to be done as root (or as a user who shares root's UID of 0). How can a process be launched so that it does not show up in a ps aux or ps ef or top listing if the command is run by non-root? Is…
warren
  • 10,322
15
votes
6 answers

How to find out from which folder a process is running?

In *nix you can use ps to see which process are running. But if an executable has multiple homonimous files in a device, we can't figure where it was invoked from. This is slightly different from my last question on this subject. How can I know the…
Jader Dias
  • 16,236
13
votes
5 answers

Why does ps aux displays a number instead of a username?

Running ps aux just gave me the following output: ... www-data 26254 0.0 0.7 27304 3544 ? S 15:07 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start 1001 25807 0.8 0.8 48444 4332 ? Sl Sep03 1330:24 ./ts3server_linux_x86 ... www-data…
Quentin
  • 233
12
votes
3 answers

Why does my system hang when I run ps, w and possibly other commands?

I don't know why, but I cannot run the ps or w commands on my Ubuntu 10.04LTS machine. I did a trace for both, and both stopped when reading part of the same file. Here's the result of running ps And here's the result for w The file also stopped…
user69239
  • 283
11
votes
1 answer

How to get stdout of a "lost" session

I don't well what's the name of the situation, I think yesterday I closed a session with a background ipython process, but I am still able to connect to it (the process is running a web server and I can load the page). Can I still get to see the…
laika
  • 396
11
votes
3 answers

watching output of "ps aux | grep blah" in tmux will not work?

I am trying to run this - watch "ps aux | grep myShittyProcess" in a tmux session. This process myShittyProcess was also started in a tmux session. The ps aux works without watch command. But as soon as I put it into watch, it fails to execute.…
Shrinath
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