FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Process Monitoring with ps

Rather than being an interactive, real-time monitoring program like top, ps works a lot more like ls (hence the name). It’s an instantaneous listing of all the processes that are running at the time you execute it. It provides all the information that top does as well as extra details about many of the values.

By default, if you run ps without any arguments, you will get a listing of only the processes owned by you that are attached to terminals (that is, those that have been run from a login session). A large array of command-line options can give you more widereaching results, and each can be found documented in man ps. You specify these options as follows:

# ps –wwaux

This combination of options produces the following: ...