SAMS Teach Yourself Unix in 10 Minutes

The ps Command

The ps command will list your current processes. You can also run processes with this command. The ps command is helpful because once you start using the background capabilities of Unix, at some point you will need to find out what all you have running. After all, if you continue to aimlessly start process after process, you may find that you have a lot more running on your Unix system than you want. In Unix, you can run the ps command at the shell prompt. Once you do this, you will see something similar to the following:

>ps
  PID TTY STAT  TIME COMMAND
 8832  p1 R    0:00 ps
30675  p1 S    0:00 -bash
(Output removed)

If you run ps and see this result, you are looking at a list of all the commands you currently have running. Don't be alarmed ...