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MAC OS® X UNIX® Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for the Mac OS® X
book

MAC OS® X UNIX® Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for the Mac OS® X

by Christopher Negus
March 2009
Intermediate to advanced
285 pages
5h 46m
English
Wiley
Content preview from MAC OS® X UNIX® Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for the Mac OS® X

Chapter 9. Checking and Running Processes

When an executable program starts up, it runs as a process that is under the management of your system's process table. Every Mac OS X system provides all the tools you need to view and change the processes running on your system.

The ps and top commands are great for viewing information on your running processes. There are literally dozens of options to ps and top to help you view process information exactly the way you want.

There are commands such as nice and renice for raising and lowering processor priority for a process. You can move processes to run in the background (bg command) and move them back to the foreground (fg command).

Sending signals to a process is a way of changing its behavior or killing it altogether. Using the kill and killall commands, you can send signals to processes by PID or name, respectively. You can also send other signals to processes to do such things as reread configuration files or continue with a stopped process.

To run commands at scheduled times or to ensure that they are not tied to your shell session, you can use the at and batch commands. To run commands repetitively at set times, there ...

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ISBN: 9780470478363Purchase book