Process management in Linux is a crucial aspect of operating system administration. A process, in the simplest terms, is an instance of a program that is running on a Linux system. Process management allows a system administrator to view and control the processes running on a Linux system. In this blog post, we will cover some of the key concepts and tools related to process management in Linux.
One of the most basic and commonly used tools for process management in Linux is the "ps" command. This command can be used to view information about processes running on the system, such as the process ID (PID), the process's parent PID (PPID), the process's status, and the amount of memory and CPU resources it is consuming.
Another commonly used tool is the "top" command, which provides a real-time, scrolling view of processes running on the system. It displays information such as the process ID, process status, CPU usage, and memory usage. "top" command also allows you to sort the process list by different criteria, such as CPU usage or memory usage.
"kill" command is used to stop a process by sending a signal to the process. Most commonly the signal sent is SIGTERM, which asks the process to terminate gracefully, allowing it to clean up any resources it has allocated. If a process does not respond to a SIGTERM signal, the "kill" command can also be used to send a SIGKILL signal, which forces the process to terminate immediately.
"nice" and "renice" commands are used to adjust the priority of a process. The "nice" command is used to start a process with a specific priority, while the "renice" command can be used to change the priority of a running process. Higher priority processes are given more CPU time, while lower priority processes are given less.
"pkill" and "pgrep" are commands that look for processes by name. pkill command sends a signal to all processes running the program name. On the other hand, pgrep command prints process IDs of all processes running the program name.
In conclusion, process management in Linux is a fundamental aspect of operating system administration. The commands and tools we discussed in this blog post, such as ps, top, kill, nice, renice, pkill and pgrep, are essential for managing processes on a Linux system and are widely used by system administrators.
- pkill
- pgrep
- SIGKILL
- SIGTERM
- TOP
- PS
