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In most Unix and Unix-like operating systems, the 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 PID TTY TIME CMD 7431 pts/0 00:00:00 su 7434 pts/0 00:00:00 bash 18585 pts/0 00:00:00 ps Users can pipeline ps with other commands, such as less to view the process status output one page at a time: $ ps -A , less Users can also utilize the 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: $ # Trying to find the PID of `firefox-bin` which is 2701 $ ps -A , grep firefox-bin 2701 ? 22:16:04 firefox-bin The use of pgrep simplifies the syntax and avoids potential race conditions: $ pgrep -l firefox-bin 2701 firefox-bin To see every process running as root in user format: # ps -U root -u USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.0 9436 128 - ILs Sun00AM 0:00.12 /sbin/init --


Header line

* = Often abbreviated


Options

ps has many options. On
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s that support the SUS and
POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...
standards, 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
environment variable An environment variable is a user-definable value that can affect the way running processes will behave on a computer. Environment variables are part of the environment in which a process runs. For example, a running process can query the va ...
s.) On such systems, 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) * lsof


References


Further reading

* *


External links

* * *
Show all running processes in Linux using ps command


{{lowercase title Unix SUS2008 utilities Unix process- and task-management-related software Plan 9 commands Inferno (operating system) commands IBM i Qshell commands