Small, Sharp Software Tools

Managing Processes and Jobs

The ps command, short for Process Status, shows you the running processes on your computer, as well as information about who’s running them. It’s good for finding out what’s currently running and for identifying a process ID with a program so you can stop it.

The ps command takes different options based on which OS you’re using. In this book, we’ll cover the Linux options, which also work on macOS.

When you execute the ps command without any arguments, you see the processes running in your current session:

$ ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 3927 pts/1    00:00:00 bash
 7139 pts/1    00:00:00 ps

The output shows the PID, or Process ID, the terminal session that’s running the command, how long it’s been running, and the command ...