Trick to avoid the form:

grep process | grep - v grep

Finding high memory usage report in human readable format.

A nicer display from http://www.web-manual.net/linux-3/find-out-top-10-cpu-memory-consuming-processes/

Okay, commands like this are a bit of a personal peeve. awk(1) operates on a /pattern/ {action} paradigm and yet I see people leave out the /pattern/ portion of an awk command all the time, opting to use grep or sed instead. You'll save yourself some typing and time if you include the /pattern/ with your {action}.

You can also use gawk:

ps auxww | gawk '/application/' | gawk '/processtobekilled/' | gawk '{print $2}' | grep -v grep | xargs kill -9

Lots of fun to run on nfs clients when the server or network connection is having issues

Daemontools[1] won't always properly reap it's children. Sometimes when you need to kill the main svscan process, you want to also clean up all of it's children. The way to do that is to send a signal to the entire process group. It is a bit tricky

[1] http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html

This command will list the PID, VEID, and Name of the 10 highest cpu using processes on a openvz host. You must have vzpid installed.

Some IO intensive process make the system unresponsive. This function periodically starts/stops a process, which hopefully releases some resources for other activities.

This function is useful when ionice is not available

defunct processes (zombies) usually have to be killed by killing their parent processes. this command retrieves such zombies and their immediate parents and kills all of the matching processes.

When you 'ps|grep' for a given process, it turns out that grep itself appears as a valid line since it contains the RE/name you are looking for. To avoid grep from showing itself, simply insert some wildcard into process' name.

proc lister

usage: p

proc killer

usage: p patt [signal]

uses only ps, grep, sed, printf and kill

no need for pgrep/pkill (not part of early UNIX)

_p(){

ps ax \

|grep $1 \

|sed '

/grep.'"$1"'/d' \

|while read a;do

printf ${a%% *}' ';

printf "${a#* }" >&2;

printf '\n';

done;

}

p(){

case $# in

0)

ps ax |grep .|less -iE;

;;

1)

_p $1;

;;

[23])

_p $1 2>/dev/null \

|sed '/'"$2"'/!d;

s,.*,kill -'"${3-15}"' &,'|sh -v

;;

esac;

}

alas, can't get this under 255 chars.

flatcap?

proc lister

usage: p

proc killer

usage: p patt [signal]

uses only ps, grep, sed, printf and kill

no need for pgrep/pkill (not part of early UNIX)

_p(){

ps ax \

|grep $1 \

|sed '

/grep.'"$1"'/d' \

|while read a;do

printf ${a%% *}' ';

printf "${a#* }" >&2;

printf '\n';

done;

}

p(){

case $# in

0)

ps ax |grep .|less -iE;

;;

1)

_p $1;

;;

[23])

_p $1 2>/dev/null \

|sed '/'"$2"'/!d;

s,.*,kill -'"${3-15}"' &,'|sh -v

;;

esac;

}

alas, can't get this under 255 chars.

flatcap?

Works on most unixes, on OpenBSD replace the "-g" parameter at the sort with a "-n".

Like the original version except it does not include the parent apache process or the grep process and adds "sudo" so it can be run by user.

This is great when you need to reboot the system-server, or your own daemon that has gone crazy

This one liner is to kill all google chrome tabs. This works similar to $ killall firefox command which is to kill all firefox processes.