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@(#)ps.1 6.3 (Berkeley) 05/12/86
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 four letters, e.g. ``RWNA''. The first letter indicates the runnability of the process: R for runnable processes, T for stopped processes, P for processes in page wait, 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. The final letter indicates any special treatment of the process for virtual memory replacement; the letters correspond to options to the vadvise (2) call; currently the possibilities are A standing for VA_ANOM, S for VA_SEQL and blank for VA_NORM; an A typically represents a lisp (1) in garbage collection, S is typical of large image processing programs which are using virtual memory to sequentially address voluminous data.
Here are the options:
5 a asks for information about all processes with terminals (ordinarily only one's own processes are displayed).
5 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.
5 e Asks for the environment to be printed as well as the arguments to the command.
5 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.
5 k causes the file /vmcore is used in place of /dev/kmem " and " /dev/mem. This is used for postmortem system debugging.
5 l asks for a long listing, with fields PPID, CP, PRI, NI, ADDR, SIZE, RSS and WCHAN as described below.
5 n Asks for numerical output. In a long listing, the WCHAN field is printed numerically rather than symbolically, or, in a user listing, the USER field is replaced by a UID field.
5 s Adds the size SSIZ of the kernel stack of each process (for use by system maintainers) to the basic output format.
5 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.
5 u A user oriented output is produced. This includes fields USER, %CPU, NICE, SIZE, and RSS as described below.
5 v A version of the output containing virtual memory statistics is output. This includes fields RE, SL, PAGEIN, SIZE, RSS, LIM, TSIZ, TRS, %CPU and %MEM, described below.
5 w Use a wide output format (132 columns rather than 80); if repeated, e.g. ww, use arbitrarily wide output. This information is used to decide how much of long commands to print.
5 x asks even about processes with no terminal.
U causes ps to update a private database where is keeps system information. Thus ``ps U'' should be included in the /etc/rc file.
5 # 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, /vmunix 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:
0
SLOAD 000001 in core SSYS 000002 swapper or pager process SLOCK 000004 process being swapped out SSWAP 000008 save area flag STRC 000010 process is being traced SWTED 000020 another tracing flag SULOCK 000040 user settable lock in core SPAGE 000080 process in page wait state SKEEP 000100 another flag to prevent swap out SDLYU 000200 delayed unlock of pages SWEXIT 000400 working on exiting SPHYSIO 000800 doing physical i/o (bio.c) SVFORK 001000 process resulted from vfork() SVFDONE 002000 another vfork flag SNOVM 004000 no vm, parent in a vfork() SPAGI 008000 init data space on demand from inode SANOM 010000 system detected anomalous vm behavior SUANOM 020000 user warned of anomalous vm behavior STIMO 040000 timing out during sleep SDETACH 080000 detached inherited by init SOUSIG 100000 using old signal mechanism
A process that has exited and has a parent that has not yet waited for the process 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.
/vmcore core file
/dev searched to find swap device and tty names
/etc/psdatabase system namelist, device, and wait channel information