# List of all processes?



## Ripcord (Nov 10, 2003)

How can I get a list of all processes running, from the Terminal?

On Linux and other OSes I believe I can run "ps -ef".

Even in 10.3.1, the "ps" man page doesn't seem to completely match "ps" the program, "-f" isn't an option regardless of whether I'm running as root or not.


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## filter (Nov 10, 2003)

Ripcord said:
			
		

> How can I get a list of all processes running, from the Terminal?
> 
> On Linux and other OSes I believe I can run "ps -ef".
> 
> Even in 10.3.1, the "ps" man page doesn't seem to completely match "ps" the program, "-f" isn't an option regardless of whether I'm running as root or not.



Try "top"


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## Ripcord (Nov 10, 2003)

...Which is very useful, but doesn't exactly give me a list of all processes =)


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## Ripcord (Nov 10, 2003)

Let me ask a different way - *should* I be able to get a complete listing of processes with "ps"?  Right now I seem to only be able to get processes spawned by users after executing bash (or something like that - I know "ps -a" doesn't show me if I'm running iTunes)


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## Zammy-Sam (Nov 11, 2003)

Resize your terminal to the max and try 'top' again


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## Arden (Nov 11, 2003)

Ripcord said:
			
		

> ...Which is very useful, but doesn't exactly give me a list of all processes =)


 In what way?  Try *man top*, and see what other modifiers you can use.


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## Cat (Nov 11, 2003)

You need the option -x for ps to tell you about graphical processes. You also may want to specify -a for all processes of all users. Try "ps -ax", should just work fine.


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## Darkshadow (Nov 11, 2003)

Try ps -auxc.  That'll show you all processes by all users, and will print out a few more details than just ps -ax.

If you liked the way the latter shows you the pathname & arguments for the running processes, then do ps -auxwwww (the w's will wrap long lines).


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## Ripcord (Nov 11, 2003)

Darkshadow, Cat, thanks!  That's exactly what I was looking for.


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## ericl (Nov 14, 2003)

#ps -ef is AT&T unix syntax

For MACOS, which is bsd, #ps -aux will give similar results.

#top is just a filter for #ps, with #top showing the processes consuming the most CPU resources.

Most of the info reported by any version of #ps is very transient in nature.  As an example, #ps may show a given process consuming 80% cpu, 2 seconds later the same process may show only consuming 3% cpu.


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