The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

2

Working with Processes

As a developer, you are already intuitively familiar with processes. They are the fruits of your labor: after writing and debugging code, your program finally executes, transforming into a beautiful operating system process!

A process on Linux can be a long-running application, a quick shell command like ls, or anything that the kernel spawns to do some work on the system. If something is getting done in Linux, a process is doing it. Your web browser, text editor, vulnerability scanner, and even things like reading files and the commands you’ve learned so far all spawn a process.

Linux’s process model is important to understand because the abstraction it gives you – the Linux process – is what all the commands and tools ...