Processes

A process is a running program. Each process on the system has a numeric process ID (PID). For a quick listing of the processes that you're running, just run the ps command on the command line. You should get a list like this:

  PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
  520  p0 S    0:00 -bash
  545   ? S    3:59 /usr/X11R6/bin/ctwm -W
  548   ? S    0:10 xclock -geometry -0-0
 2159  pd SW   0:00 /usr/bin/vi lib/addresses
31956  p3 R    0:00 ps

This is an abridged listing; yours will be much longer if you're running a windowing system. The fields are as follows:

  • PID The process ID.

  • TTY The terminal device where the process is running (don't worry about this for now).

  • STAT The process status; that is, what the process is doing at the given time and where its memory resides. For example, ...

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