Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide

Seeing All the Processes

To see all of the processes running on your Mac OS X computer, we can use the ProcessViewer application we introduced in Chapter 2. Figure 9-2 contains a screen shot of ProcessViewer displaying the user processes at a given time, whereas Figure 9-3 shows the administrator (or root) processes. Figure 9-2 contains additional process ID information at the bottom of the window.

Figure 9-2. User processes with process ID information

Figure 9-3. Administrator (root) processes

We can also use the ps command in a Terminal (Unix) window to see all of the running processes. The ps command has many options, but using the options a, u, and x gives us a user-readable listing of all the currently running processes. (ProcessViewer’s output is nicer, but it contains less information than the ps command’s output.)

Enter ps auxww in a Terminal window (the suffix ww is for wide format). Your listing should contain many of the same programs as the following listing (the processes in our ps listing differ from those in our ProcessViewer listing). Some of the processes running on your computer are bound to differ; it depends on which programs you are running and how your system is configured. wsurfer is the username of the user who logged in, and we’ve formatted the shell output ...