CHAPTER 24 Useful Utilities
Without options ps tells you what current programs you own, e.g.:
% ps
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
12263 p6 S 0:02 -tcsh (tcsh)
12608 p6 R 0:00 ps
where PID is the process ID number, TT is the terminal port, STAT is the status of the program (i.e. runnable, R; stopped, T; waiting, P or D; sleeping, S; idle, I; terminated, Z), TIME is the CPU time consumed, and COMMAND is the program.
The options to ps and it's display is a little different between SunOS 4.1.X and 5.X. To look at all process running on the system, by all users, use the options "auxww" under SunOS 4.1.X and the options "-ef" under SunOS 5.X, e.g. for SunOS 4.1.X:
% ps -auxww
USER PID %CPU %MEM SZ RSS TT STAT START TIME COMMAND
frank 514 38.5 3.2 144 376 p2 R 13:43 0:00 ps -auxww
root 113 0.8 0.1 24 16 ? S May 14 16:10 update
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D May 14 0:00 pagedaemon
root 1 0.0 0.0 72 0 ? IW May 14 0:00 /sbin/init -
root 44 0.0 0.0 56 0 ? IW May 14 0:00 portmap
frank 141 0.0 0.0 96 0 co IW May 14 0:00 -tcsh (tcsh)
root 102 0.0 0.0 72 0 co IW May 14 0:00 rpc.statd
root 50 0.0 0.0 56 0 co IW May 14 0:00 keyserv
bin 47 0.0 0.0 40 0 ? IW May 14 0:00 ypbind
root 74 0.0 0.0 24 0 ? I May 14 0:01 (biod)
root 76 0.0 0.0 24 0 ? I May 14 0:01 (biod)
root 90 0.0 0.0 72 0 ? IW May 14 0:00 syslogd
root 117 0.0 0.0 80 0 ? IW May 14 0:00 cron
root 77 0.0 0.0 24 0 ? I May 14 0:01 (biod)
root 101 0.0 0.0 80 0 co IW May 14 0:00 rpc.lockd
frank 174 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z May 14 0:00 <defunct>
root 0 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D May 14 0:01 swapper
This includes additional information, where USER is the owner of the process, MEM is the percentage of real memory the process is using, SZ is the size of the data and stack segments (in Kbytes), RSS is the real memory used (in Kbytes), and START is the time (or day) when the program was started.