CentOS System Administration Essentials

Managing processes

The bulk of this chapter will visit the procps package and the p series commands that we can use to manage our processes to make sure that we can fully appreciate the power that these tools can offer from the command line.

Many administrators are accustomed to using the ps command to determine the running process, and often the output is then piped to grep to search for a given process name. Although there is nothing incorrect with this as such, we may prefer to use tools that streamline these steps and are specifically designed tools for the purpose. For the moment, we will ignore the /ps command in preference of more specific tools with a real purpose to their binary lives.

Using the pgrep command

The /usr/bin/pgrep command