Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

Name

ps

Synopsis

    ps [options]

Report on active processes. Following the BSD tradition, a minus sign is allowed but not required in front of options. In options, list arguments should either be separated by commas or put in double quotes.

Options

-a

List other users’ processes, as well as your own.

-A

List other users’ processes, including those without a controlling terminal.

-c

In the command column, print just the command name, instead of the full command line.

-C

Use a different algorithm for calculating CPU percentage which ignores resident time.

-e

Include environment information after the command.

-h

Print a header on each page of output.

-j

Jobs format. Print the information for the command, jobc, pgid, pid, ppid, sess, state, time tt, and user keywords.

-l

Produce a long listing. Print the information for the command, cpu, nice, pid, ppid, pri, rss, state, time tt, uid, vsz, and wchan keywords.

-L

Print list of keywords (field specifiers) that can be used for output formatting or for sorting.

-m

Sort by memory usage, not by process ID.

-M

Show threads.

-N, --deselect

Negate the selection.

-o list

Like -O, but use only the keywords in list.

-O list

Append the keywords in list after the PID. The title of each keyword may be changed by using an = sign after the keyword (keyword = newtitle).

-p nums

Include only specified processes, which are given in a space-delimited list.

-r

Sort by CPU usage instead of by process ID number.

-S

Include dead child process data in parent’s total. ...