Guide to Unix/Commands/Process Management

nohup nohup lets you run a program in a way which makes it ignore hangup signals. This can be used to make a program continue running after a user has logged out. The output of the program is redirected from the standard output to the file nohup.out. Examples: $ nohup wget http://foo.org/foo_list.gz nohup: appending output to `nohup.out' $ Links: nohup, opengroup.org nohup, freebsd.org 23.4 nohup in GNU Coreutils manual, gnu.org ps ps displays a list of current processes and their properties. Examples: Processes owned by the current user: $ ps PID TTY TIME CMD 17525 pts/0 00:00:00 su 17528 pts/0 00:00:00 bash 17590 pts/0 00:00:00 ps where pid is process id. All processes: $ ps -A Links: ps, opengroup.org ps man page, man.cat-v.org kill kill is used to send termination signals to processes. Examples To send the kill signal to the processes with process id 17525, $ kill -9 17525 To send the kill signal to all processes, $ kill -9 -1 see Guide to Unix/Commands/Process Management/Kill Links: kill, opengroup.org kill man page, man.cat-v.org 24.1 kill in GNU Coreutils manual, gnu.org pgrep pgrep search and kill system processes Example: Check if apache webserver is running. $ pgrep -f apache 5580 5581 5582 5583 5584 5585 or $ svcs -a | grep -i apache. Links: pgrep, freebsd.org pgrep, manpages.ubuntu.com pkill Stop xterm program with 'pkill' program: $ pkill -9 xterm Tips: Display all the process of a user $ pgrep -l -u arky 894 bash 895 bash 897 bash 898 bash 899 bash 1045 links 1396 startx 1407 xinit 1411 openbox 1412 xterm 1413 xfaces 1414 xsetroot 1415 emacs Links: pkill, freebsd.org pkill, manpages.ubuntu.com pidof pidof display Process ID (PID) of a task Example: Display the PID of emacs process: $ pidof emacs 1415 Links: pidof, manpages.ubuntu.com killall killall kill a process by name Example: Kill the 'xfaces' program: $ killall xfaces Links: killall, freebsd.org killall, manpages.ubuntu.com