ps
(''process status'') program displays the currently-running processes. The related Unix utility top
provides a real-time view of the running processes.
Implementations
KolibriOS includes an implementation of the command. The command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system. In Windows PowerShell,ps
is a predefined command alias for the Get-Process
cmdlet, which essentially serves the same purpose.
Examples
ps
with other commands, such as less to view the process status output one page at a time:
ps
command in conjunction with the grep
command (see the pgrep
and pkill
commands) to find information about a single process, such as its id: pgrep
simplifies the syntax and avoids potential race conditions:
Header line
Options
ps
has many options. On ps
commonly runs with the options -ef, where "-e" selects every process and "-f" chooses the "full" output format. Another common option on these systems is -l, which specifies the "long" output format.
Most systems derived from BSD fail to accept the SUS and POSIX standard options because of historical conflicts. (For example, the "e" or "-e" option will display ps
commonly runs with the non-standard options aux, where "a" lists all processes on a terminal, including those of other users, "x" lists all processes without controlling terminals and "u" adds a column for the controlling user for each process. For maximum compatibility, there is no "-" in front of the "aux". "ps auxww" provides complete information about the process, including all parameters.
See also
* Task manager * kill (command) * List of Unix commands * nmon – a system monitor tool for AIX and Linux operating systems * pstree (Unix) * lsofReferences
Further reading
* *External links
* * *