Many times you need to list all processes in Linux to find out which processes are running, if a user is running any process, or if a specific process is running. Here’s how to list all processes by name, user, PID. You can use it to list all processes in Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Redhat, and other Linux systems
How to List all Processes in Linux
Here are the steps to list all processes in Linux/Unix. There are various commands like ps, top, htop and pgrep to list all processes in Linux. We will use ps command to list processes.
Open terminal and run the following command to list all processes in Linux.
$ ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.0 24336 2284 ? Ss Sep01 0:02 /sbin/init root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep01 0:00 [kthreadd] root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep01 0:00 [ksoftirqd/0] root 4 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep01 0:00 [kworker/0:0] ...
In the above command,
a = show processes for all users
u = display the process’s user/owner
x = also show processes not attached to a terminal
The above command will list all running processes.
Bonus Read : How to Search a File in Linux
List all processes by User
Here’s the command to list all processes by a specific user, say, john
$ ps -u john
OR
$ ps -U john
In the above command,
-u : Show all processes by RUID
-U : Display all processes by EUID
You can also use top or pgrep commands to list processes by user in Linux.
$ top -U john $ pgrep -u john
Bonus Read : How to Create Zip and Unzip file in Linux
List Processes by Name
Here’s the command to list all processes by a specific name, say, firefox
$ ps aux | grep firefox
In the above command, we pass the output of ps aux to grep command and search for string “firefox”.
You can also use pgrep command for this purpose. It searches the current running processes and lists PIDs of matching processes.
$ pgrep firefox
Bonus Read : How to Install Zip File in Linux
List Processes by PID
Here’s the command to list all processes by a specific PID, say, 1234
$ ps -p 1234
or
$ ps aux | grep 1234
Hopefully, now you can easily list all processes in Linux/Unix.
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