check running processes linux command line

It shows information like total tasks, CPU and Memory usage. Here is the output of top command running on my computer. Use a system monitorĪny UNIX-like system will have a tool that you can use to monitor the usage of physical resources like CPU, RAM, Network etc.Ī few tools that people prefer and are widely used are top, atop, htop and btop. But it still helps to know which child process belongs to which parent process. Since there is not much information about PID, user, start time, CPU usage etc, it is not exactly a 'go-to' command. You can also note that the PID 1 is systemd, indicating that my Linux system uses systemd. When run, the pstree will show a top-down, tree-like structure output of processes as shown in the picture above. The pstree command, as its name implies, shows a hierarchical view of parent processes and child processes. $ ps -u pratham | grep vimĥ16525 pts/2 SNl+ 0:00 nvim pstree command If I want to filter processes and only want to see if pratham has an active Vim process or not, here is how I find it out. There might be multiple users on my computer using Vim, user pratham and root. You can also use the -u flag (as opposed to u) along with ps command to specify a particular user and filter out the results, making it easier to manage. I would use the following command for that: $ pgrep alacrittyĪs I ran that command, I got four PIDs indicating that four processes match with the pattern 'alacritty' and their PIDs are outputted to the stdout. Let's say, for example, I want to see the PIDs of any process that have the name 'alacritty'. The pgrep command accepts a pattern to match and if there are any processes that match with the provided pattern, a process ID (PID) is returned to stdout.īelow is the syntax to use for pgrep command: pgrep Let's see some other Linux commands to see running processes. The only difference between using ps aux and ps -A is that when you use ps aux, you can easily grep the user, or alternatively, use the -u option.

This is because it also has 'alacritty' in the process name (as the argument).īe wary of this behaviour if you use it in a script. Notice how the grep command was also included in the output. Most people, including me, pipe this output in grep to find a needle in the haystack. This will give you an incredibly long list of running processes that were running at the time of executing the ps command. x : Include processes that are not connected to a terminal i.e.a : Display information about other users' processes as well as of the user's own (if the processes are connected to terminals i.e.Or, you can use the BSD-style syntax, which are still available in GNU ps ps aux So, running the following command will show me all processes on my system: ps -A There are several options that you can use with the ps command, but the set of options to use when you want a list of all processes is aux. The ps command is the standard command that most sysadmins use in a UNIX-like operating system. I'll also share other commands to show running processes in Linux. You may use grep to filter the process using a pattern. This will give you a list of all running processes by all users on your system. To get the list of all the running processes, run the ps command with aux argument flags in the following fashion: ps aux As a system administrator, you might need to check all the processes that are consuming your computer's resources.

Check running processes linux command line