As a system administrator, you may must examine all of the processes which are consuming your pc’s sources.
To get the listing of all of the operating processes, run the ps command with aux
argument flags within the following vogue:
ps aux
This offers you a listing of all operating processes by all customers in your system. Chances are you’ll use grep to filter the method utilizing a sample.
Let’s examine about utilizing it intimately. I am going to additionally share different instructions to point out operating processes in Linux.
ps command
The ps
command is the usual command that almost all sysadmins use in a UNIX-like working system.
There are a number of choices that you should use with the ps
command, however the set of choices to make use of once you desire a listing of all processes is aux
.
So, operating the next command will present me all processes on my system:
ps -A
Or, you should use the BSD-style syntax, that are nonetheless out there in GNU ps
ps aux
Lets break it down…
a
: Show details about different customers’ processes in addition to of the person’s personal (if the processes are related to terminals i.e. daemons get excluded)u
: Show in a person readable formatx
: Embrace processes that aren’t related to a terminal i.e. embrace daemons
This offers you an extremely lengthy listing of operating processes that had been operating on the time of executing the ps
command.
Most individuals, together with me, pipe this output in grep
to discover a needle within the haystack.
$ ps aux | grep alacritty
pratham 4653 0.1 0.0 596776 63856 ? RNsl Mar09 3:43 alacritty
pratham 4974 0.0 0.0 592792 58892 ? SNsl Mar09 0:18 alacritty
pratham 6287 0.0 0.0 590204 56308 ? SNsl Mar09 0:14 alacritty
pratham 8241 0.0 0.0 585504 51956 ? SNsl Mar09 0:07 alacritty
pratham 514536 0.0 0.0 18808 2572 pts/1 SN+ 13:56 0:00 /usr/bin/grep --color=auto alacritty
Discover how the grep
command was additionally included within the output. It is because it additionally has ‘alacritty’ within the course of identify (because the argument).
Be cautious of this behaviour [that grep will be included in the output] in case you use it in a script.
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The one distinction between utilizing ps aux
and ps -A
is that once you use ps aux
, you possibly can simply grep the person, or alternatively, use the -u
possibility. No matter works for you.
Let’s examine another Linux instructions to see operating processes.
pgrep command
The pgrep
command accepts a sample to match and if there are any processes that match with the offered sample, a course of ID (PID) is returned to stdout.
Beneath is the syntax to make use of for pgrep
command:
pgrep <sample>
For example, for instance, I wish to see the PIDs of any course of which have the identify ‘alacritty’. I’d use the next command for that:
$ pgrep alacritty
4653
4974
6287
8241
As I ran that command, I bought 4 PIDs indicating that 4 processes match with the sample ‘alacritty’ and their PIDs are outputted to the stdout.
You can even use the -u
flag (versus u
) together with ps
command to specify a selected person and filter out the outcomes, making it simpler to handle.
There is perhaps a number of customers on my pc utilizing Vim, person pratham
and root
. If I wish to filter processes and solely wish to see if pratham
has an energetic Vim course of or not, right here is how I discover it out.
$ ps -u pratham | grep vim
516525 pts/2 SNl+ 0:00 nvim
pstree command
The pstree
command, as its identify implies, reveals a hierarchical view of mum or dad processes and youngster processes.

When run, the pstree
will present a top-down, tree-like construction output of processes as proven within the image above.
You can even notice that the PID 1 is systemd, indicating that my Linux system makes use of systemd.
Since there may be not a lot details about PID, person, begin time, CPU utilization and many others, it isn’t precisely a “go-to” command. But it surely nonetheless helps to know which youngster course of belongs to which mum or dad course of.
Use a system monitor
Any UNIX-like system could have a device that you should use to observe the utilization of bodily sources like CPU, RAM, Community and many others.
A number of instruments that individuals choose and are broadly used are high
, atop
, htop
and btop
.
Right here is the output of high
command operating on my pc. It reveals info like whole duties, CPU and Reminiscence utilization.

The atop
command differs from high
, clearly, nevertheless it additionally reveals far more details about the processes like CPU, RAM utilization, I/O and many others.

The htop
utility is a broadly used useful resource monitoring utility to get a real-time bar of per-core CPU utilization, RAM and swap.

Lastly, btop
is among the latest addition to the system useful resource utilization monitoring utilities. The most effective factor about it’s that we get a historical past of CPU utilization.

Conclusion
This text covers how one can view the processes operating in your pc. And there are a number of strategies of viewing it. However, essentially the most most popular methodology is to make use of the ps
command.
If you’d like an interactive view of the operating processes (sorted by CPU utilization or RAM utilization and many others), you should use a system monitor like high or htop.