PS

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

All output formats include, for each process, the process id PID, control terminal of the process TT, cpu time used by the process TIME (this includes both user and system time), the state STAT of the process, and an indication of the COMMAND which is running. The state is given by a sequence of three letters, e.g. ``RWN''. The first letter indicates the runnability of the process: R for runnable processes, U for uninterruptible processes, S for those sleeping for less than about 20 seconds, I for idle (sleeping longer than about 20 seconds), T for stopped processes, H for halted processes, P for processes in page wait, and D for those in disk (or other short term) waits, processes. The second letter indicates whether a process is swapped out, showing W if it is, or a blank if it is loaded (in-core); a process which has specified a soft limit on memory requirements and which is exceeding that limit shows >; such a process is (necessarily) not swapped. The third letter indicates whether a process is running with altered CPU scheduling priority (nice); if the process priority is reduced, an N is shown, if the process priority has been artificially raised then a `<' is shown; processes running without special treatment have just a blank.

Here are the options:

a

asks for information about all processes with terminals (ordinarily only one's own processes are displayed).

c

prints the command name, as stored internally in the system for purposes of accounting, rather than the command arguments, which are kept in the process' address space. This is more reliable, if less informative, since the process is free to destroy the latter information.

e

asks for the environment to be printed as well as the arguments to the command.

g

asks for all processes. Without this option, ps only prints ``interesting'' processes. Processes are deemed to be uninteresting if they are process group leaders. This normally eliminates top-level command interpreters and processes waiting for users to login on free terminals.

l

asks for a long listing, with fields PPID, CP, PRI, NI, ADDR, VSIZE, RSIZE and WCHAN as described below.

m

prints out the threads corresponding to each task.

n

asks for numerical output. In a long listing, the WCHAN field is printed numerically rather than symbolically, or, in a user listing, the USER field is replaced by a UID field.

s

adds the size SSIZ of the kernel stack of each process (for use by system maintainers) to the basic output format.

tx

restricts output to processes whose controlling tty is x (which should be specified as printed by ps, e.g. t3 for tty3, co for console, da for ttyda, ? for processes with no tty, and ' a' or ' b' for ttya and ttyb respectively. This option must be the last one given.

u

A user oriented output is produced. This includes fields USER, %CPU, NICE, VSIZE, and RSIZE as described below.

v

A version of the output containing virtual memory statistics is output. This includes fields RE, SL, PAGEIN, VSIZE, RSIZE, LIM, TSIZ, TRS, %CPU and %MEM, described below. Because the NeXT computer is a Mach system (which doesn't necessarily record the same information as a UNIX 4.3BSD system) several of these fields will always be 0.

w

Use a wide output format (132 columns rather than 80); if repeated, e.g. ww, use arbitrarily wide output. This information is used to decide how much of long commands to print.

x

asks even about processes with no terminal.

U

is a flag retained for backwards compatibility. This flag does nothing on the NeXT system.

#

A process number may be given, (indicated here by #), in which case the output is restricted to that process. This option must also be last.

A second argument is taken to be the file containing the system's namelist. Otherwise, /mach is used.

Fields which are not common to all output formats:

USER

name of the owner of the process

%CPU

cpu utilization of the process; this is a decaying average over up to a minute of previous (real) time. Since the time base over which this is computed varies (since processes may be very young) it is possible for the sum of all %CPU fields to exceed 100%.

NICE

(or NI) process scheduling increment (see setpriority(2))

VSIZE

virtual size of the process (in bytes)

RSIZE

real memory (resident set) size of the process (in bytes)

LIM

soft limit on memory used, specified via a call to setrlimit(2); if no limit has been specified then shown as xx

TSIZ

size of text (shared program) image

TRS

size of resident (real memory) set of text

%MEM

percentage of real memory used by this process.

RE

residency time of the process (seconds in core)

SL

sleep time of the process (seconds blocked)

PAGEIN

number of disk i/o's resulting from references by the process to pages not loaded in core.

UID

numerical user-id of process owner

PPID

numerical id of parent of process

CP

short-term cpu utilization factor (used in scheduling)

PRI

process priority (non-positive when in non-interruptible wait)

ADDR

swap address of the process

WCHAN

event on which process is waiting (an address in the system). A symbol is chosen that classifies the address, unless numerical output is requested (see the n flag). In this case, the initial part of the address is trimmed off and is printed hexadecimally, e.g., 0x80004000 prints as 4000.

F

flags associated with process as in <sys/proc.h>:

      SLOAD       00000001      in core
      SSYS        00000002      swapper or pager process
      SLOCK       00000004      process being swapped out
      SSWAP       00000008      save area flag
      STRC        00000010      process is being traced
      SWTED       00000020      another tracing flag
      SULOCK      00000040      user settable lock in core
      SPAGE       00000080      process in page wait state
      SKEEP       00000100      another flag to prevent swap out
      SOMASK      00000200      restore old mask after taking signal
      SWEXIT      00000400      working on exiting
      SPHYSIO     00000800      doing physical i/o
      SVFORK      00001000      process resulted from vfork()
      SVFDONE     00002000      another vfork flag
      SNOVM       00004000      no vm, parent in a vfork()
      SPAGI       00008000      init data space on demand from inode
      SSEQL       00010000      user warned of sequential vm behavior
      SUANOM      00020000      user warned of anomalous vm behavior
      STIMO       00040000      timing out during sleep
      SACTIVE     00080000      process is executing
      SOUSIG      00100000      using old signal mechanism
      SOWEUPC     00200000      owe process and addupc() call at next ast
      SSEL        00400000      selecting; wakeup/waiting danger
      SLOGIN      00800000      a login process (legitimate child of init)
      SLKDONE     20000000      record-locking has been done

A process that has exited and has a parent that has not yet waited for the process is marked <defunct>; a process which is blocked trying to exit is marked <exiting>; Ps makes an educated guess as to the file name and arguments given when the process was created by examining memory or the swap area. The method is inherently somewhat unreliable and in any event a process is entitled to destroy this information, so the names cannot be counted on too much.  

FILES

SEE ALSO

BUGS

Index

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

FILES

SEE ALSO

BUGS