Commands using ps (300)
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ps returns all running processes which are then sorted by the 4th field in numerical order and the top 10 are sent to STDOUT. Show Sample Output
107ps aux | sort -nk +4 | tail -
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
72ps aux | grep [p]rocess-name -
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".
45ps awwfux | less -S -
awk is evil! Show Sample Output
22ps hax -o user | sort | uniq -c -
ps and grep is a dangerous combination -- grep tries to match everything on each line (thus the all too common: grep -v grep hack). ps -C doesn't use grep, it uses the process table for an exact match. Thus, you'll get an accurate list with: ps -fC sh rather finding every process with sh somewhere on the line. Show Sample Output
14ps -fC PROCESSNAME -
you can also pipe it to "tail" command to show 10 most memory using processes. Show Sample Output
13ps aux --sort=%mem,%cpu -
Trick to avoid the form: grep process | grep - v grep Show Sample Output
13ps axu | grep [a]pache2 -
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. Show Sample Output
12ps aux | grep "[s]ome_text" -
That is useful to discover the start time of process older than 1 day. You can also run:
ls -ld /proc/PIDThat's returning the creation date of the proc files from the process. Some users reported that this way might show you a wrong date since any other process like cron, for example, could change this date. Show Sample Output12ps -eo pid,lstart,cmd -
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")'
10ps aux | grep [h]ttpd -
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. Show Sample Output
9xprop | awk '/PID/ {print $3}' | xargs ps h -o pid,cmd -
9ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args --sort pcpu | sed "/^ 0.0 /d"
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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
8command ps -Hacl -F S -A f -
The original version gives an error, here is the correct output
7ps -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]) }' -
This one-liner will use strace to attach to all of the currently running apache processes output and piped from the initial "ps auxw" command into some awk. Show Sample Output
7ps auxw | grep sbin/apache | awk '{print"-p " $2}' | xargs strace -
6ps -o %mem= -C firefox-bin | sed -s 's/\..*/%/'
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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
6ps -C command -
enumerates the number of processes for each user. ps BSD format is used here , for standard Unix format use : ps -eLf |awk '{$1} {++P[$1]} END {for(a in P) if (a !="UID") print a,P[a]}' Show Sample Output
6ps aux |awk '{$1} {++P[$1]} END {for(a in P) if (a !="USER") print a,P[a]}' -
faster ;) but your idea is really cool
6ps -ef | grep c\\ommand -
# Delete all containers docker rm $(docker ps -a -q) # Delete all images docker rmi $(docker images -q)
6sudo docker rm $(docker ps -a -q); sudo docker rmi $(docker images -q) -
Shows a tree view of parent to child processes in the output of ps (linux). Similar output can be achieved with pstree (also linux) or ptree (Solaris). Show Sample Output
5ps auxf -
works well in crontab.
5ps -C program_name || { program_name & } -
This command loops over all of the processes in a system and creates an associative array in awk with the process name as the key and the sum of the RSS as the value. The associative array has the effect of summing a parent process and all of it's children. It then prints the top ten processes sorted by size. Show Sample Output
5ps axo rss,comm,pid | awk '{ proc_list[$2]++; proc_list[$2 "," 1] += $1; } END { for (proc in proc_list) { printf("%d\t%s\n", proc_list[proc "," 1],proc); }}' | sort -n | tail -n 10 -
This will save your open windows to a file (~/.windows). To start those applications:
cat ~/.windows | while read line; do $line &; doneShould work on any EWMH/NetWM compatible X Window Manager. If you use DWM or another Window Manager not using EWMH or NetWM try this:xwininfo -root -children | grep '^ ' | grep -v children | grep -v '<unknown>' | sed -n 's/^ *\(0x[0-9a-f]*\) .*/\1/p' | uniq | while read line; do xprop -id $line _NET_WM_PID | sed -n 's/.* = \([0-9]*\)$/\1/p'; done | uniq -u | grep -v '^$' | while read line; do ps -o cmd= $line; done > ~/.windowsShow Sample Output5wmctrl -l -p | while read line; do ps -o cmd= "$(echo "$line" | awk '$0=$3')"; done > ~/.windows -
STARTED Mon Oct 18 04:02:01 2010 Show Sample Output
5ps -o lstart <pid> - 1 2 3 > Last ›
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