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PS(1) General Commands Manual PS(1) NAME ps - process status SYNOPSIS ps option ... DESCRIPTION Ps prints information about processes. For each process reported, the process id, control terminal, status, cpu time, and command name are printed. Status is at least one of the following letters: R Runnable. S Asleep for less than 20 seconds. I Asleep for 20 seconds or more. P Waiting for memory to be paged in. T Stopped by a debugger. W Swapped out of memory. N Positive scheduling priority; see nice(2). These options modify the report for each process: f Print additional lines listing each open file in use by the process. ff Print open files, but omit the process id at the beginning of each line. h Print column headers. l Also print virtual size and current resident size in kilobytes, parent process id, and wait channel. n Don't sort the output. u Also print effective userid and recent cpu share; sort by cpu share rather than by process id. By default, processes running under the current real userid that don't appear to be shells are reported. These options pick different processes: a Report processes running under any userid. Ffile Report processes using the named file. r Report processes with real or effective userid matching the cur- rent real userid. ts Report processes with controlling terminal s. S may be (the current controlling terminal) or one of the abbreviations printed by ps, e.g. for for or for processes with no control terminal. x Include processes that appear to be shells. num Report the process with process id num. Multiple F, t, and num options are allowed; the union of all selections is printed. By default, ps looks for process data in the process file system proc(4), but reads for information about swapped processes (to avoid swapping them in just to look at them) and for information about open files. These options cause it to gather information differently: o Ignore proc(4); read directly from and the swap area. Useful mostly in single-user mode or when examining a crash dump. Mmem Read memory data from mem instead of or Dswap Read swap data from swap instead of Nname Read symbols from name instead of This matters only under option o. To examine a crash dump, use ps oMdumpfile. Option M changes the de- fault swap device to FILES process images swap device kernel memory physical memory searched to find tty names searched to find local file system names SEE ALSO kill(1), proc(4), load(1), pstat(8) BUGS Things can change while ps is running. Since ps is usually set-userid, filename arguments like that to are po- tential security botches. PS(1)