.pa 1 .he 'PS (VIII)'1/20/73'PS (VIII)' .ti 0 NAME ps -- process status .sp .ti 0 SYNOPSIS /usr/adm/ps [ -xlt____ ] .sp .ti 0 DESCRIPTION .br .in 8 ps__ prints certain facts about active processes. The information is columnar and consists of: .in +3 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" option) An educated guess as to the command line which caused the process to be created. .in -3 Some caveats: The guess as to the command name and arguments is obtained by examining the process's stack. The process is entitled to destroy this information. Also, only processes 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 subprocess designed to take up the other core slot, and is usually successful. Because ps__ examines a dynamically changing data structure, it can produce incorrect results, for example if a process's core image moves between 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). .sp .in 16 .ti 0 FILES /dev/rf0, /sys/sys/unix (to get magic numbers). .sp .ti 0 SEE ALSO kill (VIII) .sp .ti 0 DIAGNOSTICS "Bad RF", if a bad swap address turns up; various missing-file diagnostics. .sp .ti 0 BUGS As described.