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Ween I do ps -A

Then I get the list of all processes. Is there any tutorial which explains which process is doing what?

Dave M
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2 Answers2

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Usually you'll get an idea what each process does in its man page. Just run man $processname (e. g. man init) to open the corresponding man page.

Processes shown within square brackets in the output of ps -ef (e. g. [kthreadd]) are kernel process for which you won't find a man page.

joschi
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  • Is there any place on web where i can get kernel process info –  Jun 28 '10 at 06:39
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    The kernel processes are usually described in the documentation of the respective kernel subsystem, see http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.34.y.git;a=tree;f=Documentation – joschi Jun 28 '10 at 06:55
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ps -A x will list the processes as well as the command line arguments used (which is really useful). netstat -tup will list all tcp and udp connections as well as the process driving those connections. Run as root if some process ids are blanked out. lsof -p pid will list all the open handles currently owned by the process associated with pid. This information usually encapsulates files and sockets, very useful for figuring if a process has got a lock on a file. grep, awk, sort and uniq are great tools for ordering and filtering the data generated by the ps, netstat and lsof commands.

Gearoid Murphy
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