operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s, a task manager is a

system monitor A system monitor is a hardware or software component used to monitor system resources and performance in a computer system. Among the management issues regarding use of system monitoring tools are resource usage and privacy. Overview Software ...

program used to provide information about the

processes A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management *Business process, activities that produce a specific se ...

and applications running on a computer, as well as the general status of the computer. Some implementations can also be used to terminate processes and applications, as well as change the processes'

scheduling priority In computing, scheduling is the action of assigning ''resources'' to perform ''tasks''. The ''resources'' may be processors, network links or expansion cards. The ''tasks'' may be threads, processes or data flows. The scheduling activity is c ...

. In some environments, users can access a task manager with the Control-Alt-Delete

keyboard shortcut computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

. Task managers can display running services (

) as well as those that were stopped. They can display information about the services, including their

process identifier In computing, the process identifier (a.k.a. process ID or PID) is a number used by most operating system kernels—such as those of Unix, macOS and Windows—to uniquely identify an active process. This number may be used as a parameter in vario ...

and group identifier.

Common task managers

* Activity Monitor, included in macOS * Conky, for the X Window System * htop, for the Unix shell * KDE System Guard, included in KDE * nmon, for Linux and AIX * ps, for the Unix shell * Task Manager, included in Windows * tasklist, for DOS * top, for the Unix shell

References

* Task managers {{compu-prog-stub