Viewing processes: ps, pgrep, top

A process is a running program with its own PID. You can look at processes with a few commands.

ps aux            # every process on the system
ps -u student     # just yours
pgrep -x sleep    # PIDs of processes named exactly sleep
top               # a live list, q to quit

ps gives a snapshot, top refreshes live, pgrep finds a PID by name to feed into kill.

Used in

You need this in the lesson Processes and jobs.