Get the name of the parent command. This might be helpful, if you need to react on that information. E. g. a script called directly via ssh has got sshd as parent, manually invoked the parent process will probably be bash

Display the amount of memory used by all the httpd processes. Great in case you are being Slashdoted!

Well this can come handy , when you don't feel like playing with pid rather if you know

the process name say "firefox",it would kill it.The script given below would kill the process with its name given as first parameter , though not robust enough to notify that process doesn't exist , well if you know what you are doing that's wouldn't be a problem.:)

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killhim.sh

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#!/bin/bash

ps -u $USER |grep $1 | awk '{ print $1}'| xargs kill

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ps command gives the possibility to display information with custom formatting with the -o options followed by the format specifier list.

If you want a visual representation of the parent/child relationships between processes, this is one easy way to do it. It's useful in debugging collections of shell scripts, because it provides something like a call traceback.

When a shell script breaks, just remember "awwfux".

It's like `prstat -t` under Solaris

This command will show the 20 processes using the most CPU time (hungriest at the bottom).

You can see the 20 most memory intensive processes (hungriest at the bottom) by running:

Or, run both:

I find it ugly & sexy at the same time isn't it ?

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

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

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...