Commands using ps

This command kills all processes with 'SomeCommand' in the process name. There are other more elegant ways to extract the process names from ps but they are hard to remember and not portable across platforms. Use this command with caution as you could accidentally kill other matching processes!

xargs is particularly handy in this case because it makes it easy to feed the process IDs to kill and it also ensures that you don't try to feed too many PIDs to kill at once and overflow the command-line buffer.

Note that if you are attempting to kill many thousands of runaway processes at once you should use 'kill -9'. Otherwise the system will try to bring each process into memory before killing it and you could run out of memory. Typically when you want to kill many processes at once it is because you are already in a low memory situation so if you don't 'kill -9' you will make things worse

kills all pids matching the search term of "PROCESS". Be careful what you wish for :)

This finds a process id by name, but without the extra grep that you usually see. Remember, awk can grep too!

Want to know why your load average is so high? Run this command to see what processes are on the run queue. Runnable processes have a status of "R", and commands waiting on I/O have a status of "D".

On some older versions of Linux may require -emo instead of -eo.

On Solaris: ps -aefL -o s -o user -o comm | egrep "^O|^R|COMMAND"

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND

root 1828 0.0 0.0 5396 476 ? Ss 2008 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd

Check the status of a 'dd' in progress. useful when creating very large dumps and want to see how far along it is. Sending the kill -USR1 forces dd to dump it's progress to stdout

the $15 may change for you depending on your distro, etc...

This is a nice way to kill processes.. the example here is for firefox!!! substitute firefox for whatever the process name is...

Yet another ps grep function, but this one includes the column headings.

My variant on this common function. Some highlights:

Allows you to override the default ps args of "aux"

Uses bracket trick to omit the grep process itself without having to use a second grep

Always prints the correct header row of ps output

Limitations: Ugly ps error output if you forget to quote your multi word grep argument

This comes in handy if you have daemons/programs that have potential issues and stop/disappear, etc., can be run in cron to ensure that a program remains up no matter what. Be advised though, if a program did core out, you'd likely want to know why (gdb) so use with caution on production machines.

This is a 'killall' command equivalent where it is not available.

Prior to executing it, set the environment variable USERNAME to the username, whose processes you want to kill or replace the username with the $USERNAME on the command above.

Side effect: If any processes from other users, are running with a parameter of $USERNAME, they will be killed as well (assuming you are running this as root user)

[-9] in square brackets at the end of the command is optional and strongly suggested to be your last resort. I do not like to use it as the killed process leaves a lot of mess behind.

The trick here is to use the brackets [ ] around any one of the characters of the grep string. This uses the fact that [?] is a character class of one letter and will be removed when parsed by the shell. This is useful when you want to parse the output of grep or use the return value in an if-statement without having its own process causing it to erroneously return TRUE.

Useful to detect which process is causing system loads. It shows process PID so as we can take further actions.

This command is useful when you want to know what process is responsible for a certain GUI application and what command you need to issue to launch it in terminal.

sh as:

#! /bin/sh

while [ 1 -ne 6 ]; do

pid=`ps -ef | grep -v "grep" | grep "trans_gzdy" | cut -c10-17`

ps gv $pid | head -2

sleep 1

done

check changes of RSS.

Surround the first letter of what you are grepping with square brackets and you won't have to spawn a second instance of grep -v. You could also use an alias like this (albeit with sed):

alias psgrep='ps aux | grep $(echo $1 | sed "s/^\(.\)/[\1]/g")'

The description of how the one-liner works is here at my blog:

http://jugad2.blogspot.com/2008/09/unix-one-liner-to-kill-hanging-firefox.html