What command displays a list of processes running on a system?
In this article, we’ll discuss process management in Linux. A process in Linux is nothing but a program in execution. It’s a running instance of a program. Any command that you execute starts a process. Show
Types of Processes in LinuxIn Linux processes can be of two types:
Process States in LinuxA process in Linux can go through different states after it’s created and before it’s terminated. These states are:
Different Commands for Process Management in LinuxThere are two commands available in Linux to track running processes. These two commands are Top and Ps. 1. The top Command for Mananging Linux ProcessesTo track the running processes on your machine you can use the top command.
Top command displays a list of processes that are running in real-time along with their memory and CPU usage. Let’s understand the output a little better:
You can use the up/down arrow keys to navigate up and down through the list. To quit press q. To kill a process, highlight the process with the up/down arrow keys and press ‘k’. Alternatively, you can also use the kill command, which we will see later. 2. ps commandps command is short for ‘Process Status’. It displays the currently-running processes. However, unlike the top command, the output generated is not in realtime.
The terminology is as follows :
To get more information using ps command use:
Here:
While ps command only displays the processes that are currently running, you can also use it to list all the processes.
This command lists even those processes that are currently not running. 3. Stop a processTo stop a process in Linux, use the 'kill’ command. kill command sends a signal to the process. There are different types of signals that you can send. However, the most common one is ‘kill -9’ which is ‘SIGKILL’. You can list all the signals using: Kill LThe default signal is 15, which is SIGTERM. Which means if you just use the kill command without any number, it sends the SIGTERM signal. The syntax for killing a process is:
Alternatively you can also use :
This command will send a ‘SIGKILL’ signal to the process. This should be used in case the process ignores a normal kill request. 4. Change priority of a processIn Linux, you can prioritize between processes. The priority value for a process is called the ‘Niceness’ value. Niceness value can range from -20 to 19. 0 is the default value. The fourth column in the output of top command is the column for niceness value. To start a process and give it a nice value other than the default one, use:
To change nice value of a process that is already running use:
ConclusionThis tutorial covered process management in Linux. Mainly the practical aspects of process management were covered. In theory, process management is a vast topic and covering it in its entirety is out of scope for this tutorial. What is the command to list running processes in Linux?To list processes in Linux, use one of the three commands: ps, top or htop. Ps command provides static snapshot of all processes, while top and htop sorts by CPU usage.
What command shows you all processes running on a server?You need to use the ps command. It provides information about the currently running processes, including their process identification numbers (PIDs). Both Linux and UNIX support the ps command to display information about all running process.
What Windows command displays the running processes?Task List Viewer (TList), or tlist.exe, is a command-line utility that displays the list of tasks, or user-mode processes, currently running on the local computer.
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