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Wikipedia / Ps (Unix)

In most Unix and Unix-like operating systems, the ps (process status) program displays the currently-running processes. The related Unix utility top provides a real-time view of the running processes.

Implementations

KolibriOS includes an implementation of the command. The command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system. In Windows PowerShell, ps is a predefined command alias for the Get-Process cmdlet, which essentially serves the same purpose.

Examples

Users can pipeline ps with other commands, such as less to view the process status output one page at a time:

Users can also utilize the ps command in conjunction with the grep command (see the pgrep and pkill commands) to find information about a single process, such as its id:

The use of pgrep simplifies the syntax and avoids potential race conditions:

To see every process running as root in user format:

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Options

ps has many options. On operating systems that support the SUS and POSIX standards, ps commonly runs with the options -ef, where "-e" selects every process and "-f" chooses the "full" output format. Another common option on these systems is -l, which specifies the "long" output format from X/Open System Interfaces (XSI), an optional extension to POSIX.

Most systems derived from BSD fail to accept the SUS and POSIX standard options because of historical conflicts. (For example, the "e" or "-e" option will display environment variables.) On such systems, ps commonly runs with the non-standard options aux, where "a" lists all processes on a terminal, including those of other users, "x" lists all processes without controlling terminals and "u" adds a column for the controlling user for each process. For maximum compatibility, there is no "-" in front of the "aux". "ps auxww" provides complete information about the process, including all parameters.

See also

References

Further reading