pslist

NAME

SYNOPSIS

pslist [ select_opts ] [ -l | -H ]

pslist [ select_opts ] [ -H ] [ -o output_format ]

select_opts ::= [ -u user ] [ -g group ] [ -p pid ] [ -P ppid ] [ -t tty ] [ -c "command" ]

AVAILABILITY

DESCRIPTION

If the long ( -l ) or the output format option ( -o fmt ) is not used, only a list of the process-ids ( PID ) of the selected processes is printed. This might be useful when a certain set of processes have to be killed in a script.

All select_opts options provided are used to select the corresponding column(s) on the process table without the need of taking care, that also other column(s) might have the identical entry.

Therefore the command to list all PIDs of user jdoe:

        ps -ef | egrep -v egrep |\ 
          egrep -e '^jdoe[^  ]+.*' |\ 
          awk '{ print $3 }'

can be replaced by:

        pslist -u jdoe

All selection option arguments ( -u, -g, -p, -P, -t, -c ) can also be regular expressions. If the selection argument contains spaces, it has to be quoted.

When no selection option is used, the whole process table is printed.

OPTIONS

-h

usage message.

-H

print the process table column headers depending on the output. By default the header is not printed. The header goes to stderr, while the process list output goes to stdout.

-l

long list output. When this option is used header and the columns of the process table as explained below are printed.

Therefore the -l option is equal to the command call: pslist -H -o user,group,pid,ppid,tty,command.

Columns:

USER

effective user name. This will be the textual user ID if it can be obtained, the decimal representation otherwise.

GROUP

effective group ID of the process. This will be the textual group ID if it can be obtained, the decimal representation otherwise.

PID

process ID number of the process.

PPID

parent process ID.

TTY

controlling tty (terminal).

COMMAND

command with all its arguments as a string. Modifications to the arguments may be shown. The output in this column may contain spaces.

-u username

username (USER) of the process to be selected.

-g groupname

groupname (GROUP) of the process to be selected.

-p process-id

process-id (PID) to be selected.

-P parent-process-id

parent-process-id (PPID) to be selected.

-t Tty

tty of the process (TT) to be selected.

-c "command"

command including arguments (COMMAND) of the process to be selected. The command has to be quoted, if the command selection contains spaces.

-o output_format

define the pslist output format. The output_format is a comma separated list of columns of the process table to be printed. The field names are: user, group, pid, ppid, tty, command. The output is separated by one tabulator.

To produce a nice looking output, use print_list(3) to format the output of pslist:

        pslist -l 2>&1 | print_list "\t"

or

        pslist -H -o user,pid,ppid,command 2>&1 |\
          print_list "\t"

ENVIRONMENT

EXIT STATUS

4

usage printed

0

no error

FILES

EXAMPLES

SEE ALSO

NOTES

Parts of the process table columns description were extracted from the ps(1) man page for procps version 2.0.7, written by Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm@redhat.com> that is distributed with RedHat Linux 7.2.

BUGS

AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

This is free software; see edrc/doc/COPYING for copying conditions. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.