GETTING STARTED
WITH
PROCESS MANAGEMENT
LINUX & SCRIPTING
Mr. RAM
PROCESS:
A process is a unit for provisioning system resources. It is any program,
application or command that runs on the system.
A process is simply instance of a running program
A process is created in memory in its own address space when a command,
program or application is initiated.
Each process has a parent process. A single parent process may have one or
more child process and processes many of its attributes to them when they
are created.
Each process is assigned a unique identification number known as PID
(Process Identifier), which is used by the kernel to manage and control the
process through its lifecycle.
STATES OF A PROCESS:
RUNNING : The process is either running or it is ready to run.
WAITING : The process is waiting for an event or for a resource.
STOPPED : The process has been stopped, usually by receiving a signal.
ZOMBIE : The process is dead but have not been removed from the
process table. It is also known as “defunct process”.
LINUX & SCRIPTING
Mr. RAM
JOB TYPES:
FOREGROUND:
Every process when started runs in foreground by default.
A user can be done only one process at a time.
To run a job:
$firefox
To cancel foreground jobs:
$ctrl + c
BACKGROUND:
A user can be done in parallel with the process running in background since
they do not have to wait for the previous process to be completed.
Adding “&” along with the command starts it as a background process
To run a background job:
$firefox &
To list running background jobs:
$jobs
To list a process:
$ps
$top
Listing a specific process:
$pidof cron
$pgrep cron
To see every process on the system:
$ps -ef
$ps -aux
$ps -aef | grep cron
LINUX & SCRIPTING
Mr. RAM
View processes by User and Group ownership:
$ps -U raju
$ps -G developers
UNDERSTANDING PROCESS NICENESS:
Each process has an assigned priority, which is established at initiation. It is
based on a numeric value called niceness (or a nice value).
There are 40 niceness values, with -20 being the highest and +19 being the
lowest value.
Most processes started by the system use the default niceness of 0.
A process running at higher priority gets more CPU attention.
A child process inherits the niceness of its parent or calling process.
Normally, we run programs at the default niceness but we can change it
based on system load and urgency.
$nice ( 0 is default)
$ps -l
Priority is calculated based on the niceness value, column 8 - NI.
$ps -efl
To run the top command at a lower priority with nice value of +2:
$nice -2 top
From another terminal you can check with:
$ps -el |grep top
To run the top command at a highest priority with nice value of -10.
$nice --10 top
$ps -el |grep top
LINUX & SCRIPTING
Mr. RAM
RENICING A RUNNING PROCESS:
The niceness of a running process can be changed using the renice
command.
Renicing will change the priority at which the process is currently running.
To change the nice of a running top session from old priority to +5:
$pidof crond
$renice 5 pid
$ps -el|grep crond
NOTE: Options -u and -g can be used with renice to change nice values of
processes owned by a user or group members.
CONTROLLING PROCESSES WITH SIGNALS:
A system may have hundreds or thousands of processes running
simultaneously on it. It is sometimes necessary to alert a process of an event.
We can accomplish that by send a control signal to the process.
A process can send a signal to alert each other as well
A process will halt its execution as soon as it gets the signal and take
appropriate action as per the enclosed instructions in that signal.
A signal can instruct the process to terminate gracefully, kill it abruptly or
force it to re-read its configuration.
There are many signals are available for use but we well mostly deal with
only a few of them.
Each signal is associated with a unique numeric identifier, name and action.
To list all signals:
$kill -l
To kill a process:
$Kill [signal] <PID>
$ps
$kill -9 PID
LINUX & SCRIPTING
Mr. RAM
KILL: The kill command needs PID(s) to send a signal.
PKILL: The pkill command needs process name(s) to send a signal to.
KILLALL: It can be terminating all processes that match provided criteria.
$killall top
DAEMONS:
These are special types of background processes that start at system start-
up and keep running forever as a service; they don’t die.
They are started as system tasks, spontaneously. However, they can be
controlled by a user via the init / Systemd process.
INIT / SYSTEMD PROCESS:
Init/systemd is the first program (PID of 1) in the Linux that is executed
when the Linux boots up.
Simply it is a mother of all processes on the system.
It is started by the kernel itself, so in principle it does not have a parent
process.
$pidof systemd
