PS (VIII) 1/20/73 PS (VIII)





PS (VIII)                    1/20/73                    PS (VIII)





NAME            ps -- process status



SYNOPSIS        /usr/adm/ps [ -xlt ]



DESCRIPTION

        ps prints certain facts about active processes.  The in-

        formation is columnar and consists of:



           The (numerical) ID of the user associated with the

           process;



           The last character of the control typewriter of the

           process or "x" if there is no control typewriter; "x"

           lines are suppressed unless the "x" option is given.



           The number of 512-byte disk blocks holding the core

           image of the process;



           The process's unique ID (only with "l" option)



           The number of hours (mod 100) and minutes of system,

           disk, and user-process time accumulated by the process

           and all its terminated descendants (only with "t" op-

           tion)



           An educated guess as to the command line which caused

           the process to be created.



        Some caveats:



        The guess as to the command name and arguments is ob-

        tained by examining the process's stack.  The process is

        entitled to destroy this information.  Also, only pro-

        cesses whose core images are on disk have visible names.

        The ps command in particular does not, nor does any other

        process which happens to be in core at the same time.  ps

        tries to overcome this limitation by spawning a subpro-

        cess designed to take up the other core slot, and is usu-

        ally successful.  Because ps examines a dynamically

        changing data structure, it can produce incorrect re-

        sults, for example if a process's core image moves be-

        tween the time ps gets its disk address and reads its

        stack.



        Besides its utility for simple spying, ps is the only

        plausible way to find the process number of someone you

        are trying to kill (VIII).



FILES           /dev/rf0, /sys/sys/unix (to get magic numbers).



SEE ALSO        kill (VIII)



DIAGNOSTICS     "Bad RF", if a bad swap address turns up; various

                missing-file diagnostics.



BUGS            As described.
squoze.net
