From time to time you may wish to view processes that are running on Linux. To obtain a list of these processes, type ``ps -aux'', which will look similar to the following:
USER PID %CPU %MEM SIZE RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND bin 69 0.0 1.0 788 320 ? S Nov 30 0:00 /usr/sbin/rpc.portmap frampton 10273 0.0 2.1 1136 664 p0 S 14:12 0:00 -bash frampton 10744 0.0 1.1 820 360 p0 R 17:25 0:00 ps -aux frampton 10745 0.0 0.8 788 264 p0 S 17:25 0:00 more nobody 10132 0.0 1.8 1016 588 ? S 13:36 0:00 httpd nobody 10133 0.0 1.8 988 568 ? S 13:36 0:00 httpd nobody 10413 0.0 1.8 1012 580 ? S 14:56 0:00 httpd nobody 10416 0.0 1.8 1012 580 ? S 14:56 0:00 httpd nobody 10418 0.0 1.8 1012 588 ? S 14:57 0:00 httpd nobody 10488 0.0 1.7 976 556 ? S 15:34 0:00 httpd nobody 10564 0.0 1.8 988 564 ? S 16:06 0:00 httpd nobody 10600 0.0 1.8 988 564 ? S 16:15 0:00 httpd nobody 10670 0.0 1.8 988 568 ? S 16:45 0:00 httpd nobody 10704 0.0 1.7 976 552 ? S 17:03 0:00 httpd root 1 0.0 1.0 776 312 ? S Nov 30 1:13 init [3] root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Nov 30 0:00 (kflushd) root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Nov 30 0:00 (kswapd) |
The list shows you the owner of the process ("nobody" for special services such as web servers), the process identification number, the % of CPU time the process is currently using, the % of memory the process is consuming, and other related information, as well as a description of the task itself.
To get more information on a given process, type ``ps
pid'' (where
"pid" is the process
identification number). Looking at our example above, "ps
10704" would display:
10704 ? S 0:00 /usr/local/etc/httpd/httpd |
This would tell you that this particular process is a web server (the Apache web server appears multiple times in the process list; for information on why see Section 7.1).
If you happen to notice a service is not operating, you can use the
"kill -HUP pid" (where
"pid" is the process
identification number as shown in the process list produced with
"ps"). For example, if Internet services (a process called
inetd, process #123 in our example) are not working as they should, a
``kill -HUP 123'' (or even safer, use the
``killall'' command and specify the process name:
``killall -HUP inetd'') should restart the process.
The -HUP option to the kill command means "hang
up"; the process knows that it is supposed to reload itself.
Another thing to try if you are unable to resolve the problem would be to shut the system down and reboot it (see Section 6.7 for details).
At times, you may find it necessary to temporarily suspend a process, and then resume its execution at a later time. For example, you may be running a CPU-intensive job and wish to burn an IDE-based CDRecordable. Since IDE-based devices rely on the CPU for much of the work behind input/output, they are prone to buffer starvation if your CPU is too busy, and you end up with a useless coaster instead of a properly prepared CD! The following two commands will suspend a process, and the resume it, respectively:
kill -STOP 945 kill -CONT 945 |
Red Hat provides a better way of starting and stopping some processes, which are covered in Section 9.3 below.