Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

UpGuard checks and validates configurations for every major OS, network device, and cloud provider.
Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

May 19, 2015 - A Look At The New Commandlinefu
I've put together a short writeup on what kind of newness you can expect from the next iteration of clfu. Check it out here.
March 2, 2015 - New Management
I'm Jon, I'll be maintaining and improving clfu. Thanks to David for building such a great resource!
Hide

Top Tags


awk, bash, curl, find, grep, Linux, sed
Hide

Functions

Commands using ps from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using ps - 242 results
ps ax| awk '/[h]ttpd/{print $1}'| xargs kill -9
2009-12-07 09:53:18
User: r00t4u
Functions: awk kill ps xargs
-2
Up
Down
Killing multiplpe process for one program like apache, wget, postfix etc.
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux| grep -v grep| grep httpd| awk {'print $2'}| xargs kill -9
2009-12-06 05:39:50
User: r00t4u
Functions: awk grep kill ps xargs
-2
Up
Down
Killing multiplpe process for one program like apache, wget, postfix etc.
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -o thcount -p <process id>
2009-12-04 14:39:53
User: lukasz
Functions: ps
Tags: count process thread thcount
3
Up
Down
Return threads count of a process

Source: http://superuser.com/questions/49408/how-do-i-monitor-or-view-the-thread-count-of-a-certain-process-on-aix

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
psu(){ command ps -Hcl -F S f -u ${1:-$USER}; }
2009-11-13 06:10:33
User: AskApache
Functions: command ps
Tags: bash tree pstree process ps askapache username
4
Up
Down
Output Detailed Process Tree for any User

An easy function to get a process tree listing (very detailed) for all the processes of any gived user.

This function is also in my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -ec -o command,rss | grep Stainless | awk -F ' ' '{ x = x + $2 } END { print x/(1024) " MB."}'
2009-11-04 19:01:22
User: unixmonkey6893
Functions: awk grep ps
Tags: macosx sum Stainless.app
0
Up
Down
Sum of the total resident memory Stainless.app is using.

Adds up the total memory used by all Stainless processes: 1 Stainless, 1 StainlessManager and 1 StainlessClient per tab open.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -eo pcpu,user,pid,cmd | sort -r | head -5
2009-11-03 14:41:55
User: ferqwerty
Functions: head ps sort
1
Up
Down
Display top 5 processes consuming CPU
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -eo user,pcpu,pmem | tail -n +2 | awk '{num[$1]++; cpu[$1] += $2; mem[$1] += $3} END{printf("NPROC\tUSER\tCPU\tMEM\n"); for (user in cpu) printf("%d\t%s\t%.2f\t%.2f\n",num[user], user, cpu[user], mem[user]) }'
2009-10-29 12:49:01
User: georgz
Functions: awk ps tail
7
Up
Down
cpu and memory usage top 10 under Linux

The original version gives an error, here is the correct output

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux --sort=%mem,%cpu
2009-10-10 22:48:51
User: mrwill
Functions: ps
Tags: Process Management ps
13
Up
Down
Sort all running processes by their memory & CPU usage

you can also pipe it to "tail" command to show 10 most memory using processes.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -ef | grep pmon
2009-10-10 03:13:46
User: Sriregati
Functions: grep ps
Tags: file count
-5
Up
Down
Count the total number of files in each immediate subdirectory
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -C program_name || { program_name & }
2009-09-24 03:35:39
User: syssyphus
Functions: ps
5
Up
Down
Restart command if it dies.

works well in crontab.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -u<user>
2009-09-16 05:24:41
User: sathyz
Functions: ps
Tags: ps
-1
Up
Down
get users process list
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
psg() { ps aux | grep "[${1[1]}]${1[2,-1]}"; }
2009-09-07 04:37:11
User: jedahan
Functions: grep ps
-5
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

alias ps?='psg' for maximum hawtness. Works in bash or zsh.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -ef | awk '/process-name/ && !/awk/ {print}'
2009-08-19 11:22:09
User: dopeman
Functions: awk ps
1
Up
Down
Search for an active process without catching the search-process

This does the same thing as many of the 'grep' based alternatives but allows a more finite control over the output. For example if you only wanted the process ID you could change the command:

ps -ef | awk '/mingetty/ && !/awk/ {print $2}'

If you wanted to kill the returned PID's:

ps -ef | awk '/mingetty/ && !/awk/ {print $2}' | xargs -i kill {}
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
command ps -Hacl -F S -A f
2009-08-19 07:08:19
User: AskApache
Functions: command ps
Tags: Process Management pstree ps shell signal process heirarchy
8
Up
Down
View Processeses like a fu, fu

I don't truly enjoy many commands more than this one, which I alias to be ps1.. Cool to be able to see the heirarchy and makes it clearer what need to be killed, and whats really going on.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | grep [c]ommandname
2009-08-17 12:29:16
User: alvinx
Functions: grep ps
-4
Up
Down
omit grep
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -C command
2009-08-14 15:30:42
User: recursiverse
Functions: ps
6
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

preferred way to query ps for a specific process name (not supported with all flavors of ps, but will work on just about any linux afaik)

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | grep [p]rocess-name
2009-08-13 05:44:45
User: olorin
Functions: grep ps
66
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

As an alternative to using an additional grep -v grep you can use a simple regular expression in the search pattern (first letter is something out of the single letter list ;-)) to drop the grep command itself.

Show sample output | Comments (14) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | grep process-name | grep -v "grep"
2009-08-13 04:40:16
User: pavanlimo
Functions: grep ps
-4
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one
Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -A
2009-08-11 16:52:59
User: xraj
Functions: ps
-13
Up
Down
ps -A

list all the processes

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -o comm= -p $(ps -o ppid= -p $$)
2009-08-03 07:41:21
User: olorin
Functions: ps
4
Up
Down
Who invoked me? / Get parent command

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

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -o rss -C httpd | tail -n +2 | (sed 's/^/x+=/'; echo x) | bc
2009-07-31 15:15:08
User: ricardoarguello
Functions: echo ps sed tail
4
Up
Down
How much RAM is Apache using?

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

Comments (8) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -u $USER |grep $1 | awk '{ print $1}'| xargs kill
2009-07-20 10:06:32
User: buffer
Functions: awk grep ps xargs
-4
Up
Down
Kill a process with its name

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.:)

----

killhim.sh

----

#!/bin/bash

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

----

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps ax -o "%p %U %u %x %c %n"
2009-07-14 17:21:59
User: servermanaged
Functions: ps
4
Up
Down
Format ps command output

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

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps awwfux | less -S
2009-07-04 09:39:28
User: ToyKeeper
Functions: less ps
42
Up
Down
Show a 4-way scrollable process tree with full details.

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".

Comments (7) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | grep -v `whoami`
2009-06-26 08:28:06
User: unixmonkey4415
Functions: grep ps
Tags: Process Management
-4
Up
Down
Check processes runed not by you
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate