Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Name

ps

Synopsis

ps [options]

Reports on active processes. Note that you do not need to include a - before options. In options, list arguments should either be separated by commas or be put in double quotes.

Options

a

List all processes.

c

List the command name without the path.

e

Include environment.

h

Includes a header with each page of information.

j

List information for keywords: user, pid, ppid, pgid, sess, jobc, state, tt, time, and command.

L

List all keywords.

l

List information for keywords: uid, pid, ppid, cpu, pri, nice, vsz, rss, wchan, state, tt, time, and command.

M

List each tasks threads.

m

Sort by memory usage.

O

Appends the keywords that are in a list after the process ID. The title of the keyword can be changed by using an = sign after the keyword. (keyword=newtitle)

o

Same as O except it uses only the supplied keywords for the output of ps.

p

List information for the supplied PID.

r

List by cpu rather than by PID.

S

Include child processes’ CPU time and page faults.

T

List information for standard input process.

t tty

Display only processes running on tty.

U

List processes belonging to username.

u

List information for keywords: user, pid, %cpu, %mem, vsz, rss, tt, state, start, time, and command. The listing will be as if the -r option was supplied to ps.

v

List information for keywords: pid, state, time, sl, re, pagein, vsz, rss, lim, tsiz, %cpu, %mem, and command. The listing will be as if the -m option was supplied to ps.

w

Wide format. Don’t truncate ...