4
Processes and Process Control
The main role of an operating system is to allow applications to run on a computer and use its resources. A lot of the time, the role of the systems administrator boils down to making sure that the right processes are running and diagnosing if they are not running. Thus, it is important to understand how the operating system starts and handles processes and how to start, stop, and monitor them.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Executables versus processes
- Process termination, exit codes, and signals
- The process tree
- Process search and monitoring
Executables versus processes
Programs are distributed as executable files. In many historical operating systems, programs would be loaded from
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