Viewing processes

There are a few ways you can see what processes are running.

top
will show you the top processes on the system in a pseudo-live table. By default, this is in terms of CPU - see  to change that. By default top includes processes from all users: % top To see only your processes, use % top -u $LOGNAME Nice levels are the column "NI".

On Solaris, you can also use the similar program prstat. To see your processes with a summary of CPU and memory use: % prstat -a -U $LOGNAME

ps
shows a static list of processes - useful when killing processes for example. By default, the list is unsorted and includes all processes with the same effective user ID (EUID) as the current user (you) and associated with the same terminal as the invoker (the terminal you're using right now) and which have a TTY: ps If you have processes running which are not associated with the same terminal you're using now (for example from cron), they will not be shown. To see them, lift the requirement that the processes have a TTY using: ps x

To make a search over the processes, use grep. ps x|grep "bot" gives you all processes which has the sequence "bot" in the command (please note that grep is case-sensive by default; you can change that with -i).

To view nice levels, use (possibly in combination with other parameters): ps l

killing processes

 * See Code snippets