Essential System Administration Pocket Reference

Process and Resource Management

Job control

command &	Run the specified command in the background.
^Z	Stop foreground process.
jobs	List background processes.
fg [job]	Resume the specified job in the foreground/background.
bg [job]	job defaults to the stopped foreground job. %n refers to background job n. %?str refers to the background job whose command string contains the specified character string.
~^Z	Suspend an rlogin session. Add an additional tilde for each level of nesting (e.g., ~~^Z suspends a second-level rlogin session back to the first-level rlogin session, while ~^Z suspends the second-level session back to the local session).

ps	ps aux	AIX, FreeBSD, Linux
	/usr/ucb/ps aux	Solaris
	ps -elf	System V version: HP-UX

Display the detailed process list. The al option to the first two commands produces a different listing, which displays the process priority and nice number.

ps output columns

USER (HP-UX: UID)

Username of the process owner

PID

Process ID

%CPU

Estimated fraction of CPU consumed (FreeBSD); CPU time/elapsed time (AIX, Solaris, Linux).

%MEM

Estimated fraction of consumed system memory

SZ

Virtual memory used, in KB (HP-UX: pages)

RSS

Physical memory used, in KB

TT (HP-UX: TTY)

TTY associated with the process

STAT (HP-UX: S)

Current process state flag(s):

R	Running or runnable
S	Sleeping
I	Idle (HP-UX: intermediate state)
T	Stopped
Z	Zombie process
D	Disk wait (not HP-UX)
X	Growing: waiting for memory (HP-UX)
K	Available ...