PS(1)

NAME
ps - process status

SYNOPSIS
ps [ acegklstuvwx# ]

DESCRIPTION
Ps prints information about processes. Normally, only your processes are candidates to be printed by ps; specifying a causes other users processes to be candidates to be printed; specifying x includes processes without control terminals in the candidate pool.

All output formats include, for each process, the process id PID, control terminal of the process TT, cpu time used by the process TIME (this includes both user and system time), the state STAT of the process, and an indication of the COMMAND which is running. The state is given by a sequence of three letters, e.g. ``RWN''. The first letter indicates the runnability of the process: R for runnable processes, T for stopped processes, D for those in disk (or other short term) waits, S for those sleeping for less than about 20 seconds, and I for idle (sleeping longer than about 20 seconds) processes. The second letter indicates whether a process is swapped out, showing W if it is, or a blank if it is loaded (in-core); a process which has specified a soft limit on memory requirements and which is exceeding that limit shows >; such a process is (necessarily) not swapped. The third letter indicates whether a process is running with altered CPU scheduling priority (nice); if the process priority is reduced, an N is shown, if the process priority has been artificially raised then a `<' is shown; processes running without special treatment have just a blank.

Here are the options:

a   asks for information about all processes with controlling terminals (ordinarily only one's own processes are displayed).

c   prints the command name, as stored internally in the system for purposes of accounting, rather than the command arguments, which are kept in the process' address space. This is more reliable, if less informative, since the process is free to destroy the latter information.

e   Asks for the environment to be printed as well as the arguments to the command. Ignored when selected for c or v formats.

g   Asks for all processes. Without this option, ps only prints ``interesting'' processes. Processes are deemed to be uninteresting if they are process group leaders. This normally eliminates top-level command interpreters and processes waiting for users to login on free terminals.

k   causes the file /vmcore is used in place of /dev/kmem and /dev/mem. This is used for postmortem system debugging.

l   asks for a long listing, with fields PPID, CP, PRI, NI, ADDR, SIZE, RSS and WCHAN as described below.

s   Adds the size SSIZ of the kernel stack of each process (for use by system maintainers) to the basic output format.

tx  restricts output to processes whose controlling tty is x (which should be specified as printed by ps, e.g. t3 for tty3, tco for console, td0 for ttyd0, t? for processes with no tty, t for processes at the current tty, etc). This option must be the last one given.

u   A user oriented output is produced. This includes fields USER, %CPU, %MEM, NICE, SIZE, RSS, and ENG as described below.

v   A version of the output containing virtual memory statistics is output. This includes fields SL, RE, PAGEIN, SIZE, RSS, LIM, TSIZ, %CPU, %MEM, and ENG described below.

w   Use a wide output format (132 columns if current width is less than that); if repeated, e.g. ww, use arbitrarily wide output. This information is used to decide how much of long commands to print.

x   asks even about processes with no controlling terminal.

#   A process number may be given, (indicated here by #), in which case the output is restricted to that process. This option must also be last.

A second argument is taken to be the file containing the system's namelist. Otherwise, /dynix is used. A third argument tells ps where to look for core if the k option is given, instead of /vmcore. If a fourth argument is given, it is taken to be the name of a swap file to use instead of the default /dev/drum.

Fields which are not common to all output formats:
ENG the processor number on which a runnable process is running (blank if the process is not running)
USER
    name of the owner of the process
%CPU
    cpu utilization of the process; this is a decaying average over up to a minute of previous (real) time. Since the time base over which this is computed varies (since processes may be very young) it is possible for the sum of all %CPU fields to exceed 100% times the number of active processors in the system.
NICE
    (or NI) process scheduling increment (see setpriority(2))
SIZE
    virtual size of the process (in 1024 byte units)
RSS real memory (current resident set) size of the process (in 1024 byte units) or, if the process is swapped, the resident set size when the process was swapped out.
LIM soft limit on memory used, specified via a call to setrlimit(2); if no limit has been specified then shown as xx
TSIZ
    size of text (shared program) image
%MEM
    percentage of real memory used by this process.
RE  residency time of the process (seconds in core)
SL  sleep time of the process (seconds blocked)
PAGEIN
    number of disk i/o's resulting from references by the process to pages not loaded in core.
UID numerical user-id of process owner
PPID
    numerical id of parent of process
CP  short-term cpu utilization factor (used in scheduling)
PRI process priority (non-positive when in non-interruptible wait)
ADDR
    swap address of the process
WCHAN
    event on which process is waiting (an address in the system).

F   flags associated with process as in <sys/proc.h>:

	SLOAD	00001	in core
	SSYS	00002	swapper or pager (system) process
	STRC	00010	process is being traced
	SWTED	00020	another tracing flag
	SWTOK	00040	writing on text ok during trace
	SOMASK	00080	restore old mask after taking signal
	SVFORK	00100	process resulted from vfork()
	SNOVM	00200	no vm, parent in a vfork()
	STIMO	00400	timing out during sleep
	SOUSIG	00800	using old signal mechanism
	SSEL	01000	selecting; wakeup/waiting danger
	SIGWOKE	02000	signal woke process up, not v_sema()
	SWPSYNC	04000	synch with swapper during swapout
	SFSWAP	08000	force swap self, swapper couldn't
	SSHMEM	10000	connected to one or more shared memories

A process that has exited and has a parent, but has not yet been waited for by the parent is marked <defunct>; a process which is blocked trying to exit is marked <exiting>; Ps makes an educated guess as to the file name and arguments given when the process was created by examining memory or the swap area. The method is inherently somewhat unreliable and in any event a process is entitled to destroy this information, so the names cannot be counted on too much.

FILES
/dynix    system namelist
/dev/kmem    kernel memory
/dev/drum    swap device
/vmcore    core file
/dev    searched to find swap device and tty names
/tmp/.ps_data    system namelist, device, and uid cache

SEE ALSO
kill(1), w(1)

BUGS
Things can change while ps is running; the picture it gives is only a close approximation to reality.