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Questions tagged [ps]

In most Unix-like operating systems, the "ps" program displays the currently-running processes.

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150 votes
6 answers
173k views

Show full process name in top

I'm running a Rails stack on Ubuntu. When I call ps -AF, I get a descriptive process name set by the Apache module like 00:00:43 Rails: /var/www... which is really helpful in diagnosing load issues. ...
Ben K.'s user avatar
  • 2,459
63 votes
8 answers
25k views

How to prevent "ps" reporting its own process?

$ ps | grep django 28006 ttys004 0:01.12 /usr/bin/python bin/django celeryd --beat 51393 ttys005 0:01.45 /usr/bin/python bin/django celeryd -l INFO 51472 ttys005 0:01.29 /usr/bin/python bin/...
Steve Bennett's user avatar
55 votes
1 answer
115k views

what s+ S1+ T R+ mean in ps ax ps list

I run this command and got result this but not able to understand the result which node instance should i kill ps ax | grep node 23308 pts/3 S+ 0:00 sudo node index.js 23310 pts/3 Sl+ ...
Rahul Mehta's user avatar
  • 1,019
21 votes
2 answers
23k views

How is memory usage reported in Linux?

Using ps, I can see the size, the vsize (same as top's VIRT?), and the rss (same as top's RES?). (One more I see in top is SHR.) Could someone summarize for me what these different fields mean?
Jim Hunziker's user avatar
  • 1,862
14 votes
4 answers
20k views

Monitor all newly spawned processes on a Linux machine

Sometimes a process comes and goes faster than I can ps aux, I tried watch -d -n0.1 "ps aux | tail" but again, that's restricted to 1/10th of a second. What I really want is to run a command and ...
Vasiliy Sharapov's user avatar
10 votes
1 answer
36k views

D+ status in ps output

Is there any difference between D, Ds and D+ status of process from the ps output $ ps -e -o pid,stat,comm,wchan=WIDE-WCHAN-COLUMN | grep D PID STAT COMMAND WIDE-WCHAN-COLUMN 12987 D+ du ...
rajeshrajan's user avatar
9 votes
1 answer
18k views

CPU% more than 100 in ps -aux

We use ps -aux to find out when tomcat process takes high CPU utilization, if that so we will send a alert to Group. But some times %CPU shows more than 100, but our application working fine. Is it ...
Selvakumar P's user avatar
8 votes
2 answers
25k views

Who is user 500?

after runnning ps aux command I see this line 500 23931 0.0 0.6 63764 6880 ? S 08:49 0:01 /usr/sbin/sw-cp-serverd -f /etc/sw-cp-server/config I'm a beginner in this whole vps ...
Nikola's user avatar
  • 877
8 votes
2 answers
47k views

Unix / Linux command to see finished or killed processes

Is there a way to see processed that finished running or were killed a given amount of time ago? For instance, ps -ef will show all running processes, but if a process finishes, it is no longer ...
Rooster's user avatar
  • 515
7 votes
1 answer
8k views

What is causing these flush processes?

What are these flush processes? $ ps aux | grep flush root 710 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 2012 2:29 [flush-202:1] root 10732 6.2 0.0 0 0 ? S Apr14 453:33 [...
dotancohen's user avatar
  • 2,650
6 votes
5 answers
33k views

Getting full path of executables in 'ps auxwww' output

Consider the following lines from a "ps auxwww" output: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 4262 0.0 0,1 76592 1104 s005 Ss 10:...
knorv's user avatar
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6 votes
2 answers
21k views

busybox - how to list process priority?

How to list process priority on an embedded linux with busybox?
danatel's user avatar
  • 467
6 votes
3 answers
3k views

Wchan section in ps output not showing anything

I know that if a process go into D state then it means that it is in uninterruptable state. The process can not be killed by any signal. It will only come out of that state on reboot or if I/O wait is ...
shivams's user avatar
  • 519
6 votes
1 answer
2k views

When using ps with a user-defined format, how do I get a column with unlimited width?

I'm using ps with the user-defined format as shown below: $ ps ax -o pid,args,psr,pcpu | grep python 2236 /usr/bin/python2.7 -u /home 2 0.0 2452 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/un 2 0.0 2480 /usr/bin/...
Joshua Garcia's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
5k views

Linux: ps -awx vs. ps -awwx

Does anyone know the difference of ps -awx vs. ps -awwx? I'm tracking down some processes, and I see significantly more information when I add an additional "w". Does this work like in other cases (...
drewrockshard's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
14k views

ps show column name

Using these ps options I cut 10 lines and order output of ps by cpu usage (pcpu): ps -eo pcpu,etime,pid,user,args --no-headers| sort -t. -nk1,2 -k4,4 -r |head -n 10 I need also show the name of ...
watchmansky's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
7k views

How do get apache display url request in Top and PS?

Is there a way to get apache to display the url that it is handling in top and ps? This would help us nail down performance issues much more faster. Thanks.
user76952's user avatar
5 votes
3 answers
5k views

How to find full process arguments and associated listening ports?

I can execute netstat -atulpn | grep java to find all Java processes with their accompanying ports, which is great, however I would like to also have the processes full execution arguments also shown. ...
ylluminate's user avatar
  • 1,207
4 votes
4 answers
605 views

Who is 1014? I have no user on my system named 1014, so why is this httpd process run as 1014?

[root@home ~]# ps au | grep httpd 1014 9701 0.0 0.2 281620 3124 pts/24 Sl+ 18:41 0:00 ./bin/httpd -X root 9742 0.0 0.0 3084 720 pts/22 R+ 18:45 0:00 grep httpd By the ...
giantforest's user avatar
4 votes
3 answers
15k views

Identify processes running inside Docker, in Process List

I realize that processes that run inside Docker containers appear on the hosts' process list: # ps aux | grep mariadb root 12486 0.0 0.0 112812 976 pts/0 S+ 14:47 0:00 grep --color=auto ...
Nuno's user avatar
  • 653
4 votes
1 answer
5k views

extra sshd root instance

I have logged in to my server running Centos 7 via ssh and executed the following command: [me@server ~]$ ps -ef --forest | grep ssh root 476 1 0 Dec02 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D ...
Skeeve's user avatar
  • 195
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

How to get /proc/[pid]/cmdline to contain command arguments?

I am running into an issue where some of my Ubuntu/Debian servers do not show the arguments passed to rake in either top or ps. I have tracked this problem down to a variation in output given by /...
wbharding's user avatar
  • 461
4 votes
1 answer
4k views

Docker memory leak?

I'm running Docker 0.9.0 uname -a Linux 3.11.0-18-generic #32-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 18 21:11:14 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux I have 40 containers running at once. Each container is fairly ...
Ryan Hewitt's user avatar
4 votes
4 answers
220 views

Is one type of options to ps preferred?

GNU ps supports BSD-style options, UNIX-style options, and GNU long options. Is using one of these types (in scripts and at the command line) preferred over the others? I get the impression from the ...
Jim Hunziker's user avatar
  • 1,862
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

What's pgrp in this context?

Quoted from here. gdb puts the debugged process in its own pgrp and sets the terminal to that pgrp. (Try e.g. ps j on the PIDs of gdb and your program being debugged.) And what does it mean ...
locale's user avatar
  • 393
4 votes
2 answers
2k views

Weird process CPU time output on Ubuntu under Amazon EC2

I have just started a large instance using ami-fa01f193 AMI. When I use ps aux, a bunch of random processes will show HUGE numbers for the CPU time used. Looks like some sort of overflow. Did someone ...
Mad Wombat's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
2k views

How to filter out default system processes with ps?

Is there a way to get a list of running processes on a Linux system, minus the default ones running on every system (i.e. only the ones that were installed/executed after the fact). Can this be ...
ddario's user avatar
  • 491
4 votes
2 answers
4k views

ps returning unreasonably high values for %cpu and cputime

We've had an alert from Nagios on one of our servers that we have a runaway process. Logging in and running top doesn't show anything bad happening, but when I look at the output of ps I see something ...
alt's user avatar
  • 507
3 votes
1 answer
646 views

Linux: ps command's output is randomly different than expected, can you find the reason?

I wrote a Nagios check which counts how many pgpool processes are running and how long each process runs. I'm running on Linux CentOS 6.4 In order to get the time the process is running, I'm using ...
Itai Ganot's user avatar
  • 10.9k
3 votes
4 answers
426 views

I want to find something and kill it

I keep running these two commands over and over: $ ps aux | grep php | grep -v grep www-data 3663 100 14.8 328620 304900 ? R 12:56 0:54 php /home/jason/projects/mcif/./symfony import:...
Jason Swett's user avatar
  • 1,468
3 votes
3 answers
2k views

How do I kill a runaway cronjob

I have a cronjob that is set to run constantly. It's a php file that streams data from twitter. However twitter goes down every once a while or we lose connection so I have cron checking back every ...
Caimen's user avatar
  • 133
3 votes
3 answers
8k views

How to change time format to seconds in ps -p?

I wrote a rsync script which also checks for how long the process of the script has been running. This is the relevant part: time=$(ps -p $processid -o etime= | awk -F: '{print $2}') # number of ...
Itai Ganot's user avatar
  • 10.9k
3 votes
1 answer
904 views

top, w, ps showing wrong CPU times

I've spotted this trait recently on some of my Ubuntu servers (10.04.2) on Amazon EC2 (not noticed this on any physical boxes), and can't quite comprehend how it's getting these figures. They can't be ...
dannosaur's user avatar
  • 988
3 votes
1 answer
692 views

ps command output does not display wchan values in fedora

I am running fedora 5.3.12-200.fc30.x86_64 and testing simple tcp client/server codes. I tried running different ps commands but I can not get any value displayed in wchan field, although in my case ...
Зоран Пантић's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
3k views

List environment variables of a running process on AIX without character limit

Today I was trying to debug an issue where a process was not picking up the correct environmental variable. It took us hours before we realized that it wasn't picking up the correct variable. I tried ...
user606723's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
1k views

Command referenced in `ps aux` doesn't exist?

When I run ps aux | grep /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd I get the following output. USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND www-data 9837 0.0 0.0 23112 1360 ? ...
Citricguy's user avatar
  • 168
2 votes
2 answers
2k views

In Linux, when I use the PS command, why do I see multiple lines for www-data?

I have a LAMP server that uses ubuntu 9.10, apache2, mysql5 and php5. When I login as root through the shell, I run a "ps aux" command and see something like the following www-data 3151 0.1 4.3 ...
learningtech's user avatar
  • 7,549
2 votes
1 answer
506 views

Find site of apache from linux process table

I am using Ubuntu server and when I run ps aux I get the following process table http://pastebin.com/NJsASBek as we can see apache proceess are shown like this: www-data 26487 0.0 0.9 245476 14920 ?...
quarry32's user avatar
  • 255
2 votes
4 answers
9k views

Can 'ps' show me only processes I own, plus all their ancestors, in tree format?

Here's what I want to do: I want to get a tree-formatted list of processes from ps (as when you do ps auxwwf), but only of processes that are either owned by me, or are ancestors of processes owned by ...
dirtside's user avatar
  • 1,641
2 votes
2 answers
574 views

Where does the name in the "COMMAND" field of `ps aux` come from?

I understand it displays the command with arguments, or when unavailable the command in square brackets. But where do the names come from for processes such as passenger worker ruby instances, which ...
jberryman's user avatar
  • 934
2 votes
1 answer
2k views

ps is giving a segmentation fault

I'm getting a segmentation fault when I try to run a simple "ps aux" for a certain user. If I run as root or another user it runs well. So I think is something related with ulimits, but I think that ...
julian's user avatar
  • 153
2 votes
3 answers
5k views

Excluding child processes from ps

Background: To reload app configuration I need to kill -HUP the parent processes' PIDs. To find PIDs I currently use ps auxf | grep gunicorn with the following example output: $ ps auxf | grep ...
stpe's user avatar
  • 125
2 votes
4 answers
2k views

"ps -ew" won't show wide output

It only shows the first 15 characters from /proc/pid/stat. But "ps -w pid" shows wide output. Why? Is this a bug? Thanks.
Fish Monitor's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
614 views

how to find Linux processes started at a certain time

I am trying to debug Linux vnc session that is not responding. I think I clicked the KDE konsole icon and that is when the vnc session became frozen. I can see the windows and menu in KDE but nothing ...
user2979872's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
309 views

AWS / EC2 / Ubuntu 16.04: apache2 processes although apache is not installed?

I created an AWS Ubuntu 16.04 EC2 instance a while ago and had it running for some time not really doing anything. Now as I try to bring that machine bring to service, I notice a few things I can not ...
ssc's user avatar
  • 1,189
2 votes
1 answer
627 views

Process claims to use a lot of memory, but 'free' indicates that the memory is still free

I've seen the opposite of this, but this is puzzling. In short, I have a process where %MEM claims to use 74% of memory when using 'ps' and 'top'. However, 'free' shows that I'm only using 32% of the ...
Joel Griffiths's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
788 views

what is khostd?

I see this process but can't seem to find anything about it on Google: init─┬─crond ├─dbus-daemon ├─events/0 ├─events/1 ├─httpd───8*[httpd] ├─khelper ├─khostd───khostd ...
lamp_scaler's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
3k views

Enter-PSSession : Connecting to remote server failed

I have three VMs: A, B and C. I use Enter-PSSession to connect them. But recently connecting B from A (A->B) never succeeds. Others ways (A->C, C->A, B->A, B->C, C->B) have no problem. The error ...
liupro925's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
531 views

Determine from where is "sh" being run under apache www-data user using using PF or NETSTAT [duplicate]

I am working with a compromised Ubuntu 8.04 Plesk 9.5.4 server. It seems that a script on the server is continuously doing reverse lookups to random IPs on the Internet. I first spotted it during by ...
Eugene van der Merwe's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
3k views

Nginx/php-fpm processes falls in Uninterruptible sleep

I got nagios critical warning about a server, and when i checked ps -aux i found that all of nginx (php-fpm) are in Uninterruptible sleep www-data 1330 0.4 0.3 299992 108560 ? D 16:06 0:...
Alaa Alomari's user avatar