test

System Administration Guide, Volume 2

Displaying Information About Processes (/proc Tools)

You can display detailed, technical information about active processes by using some of the process tool commands contained in /usr/proc/bin. The table below lists these process tools. Refer to proc(1) for more information.

Table 35-2 /usr/proc/bin Process Tools That Display Information

Process Tool 

What It Displays 

pcred

Credentials 

pfiles

fstat and fcntl information for open files in a process

pflags

/proc tracing flags, pending and held signals, and other status information

pldd

Dynamic libraries linked into a process 

pmap

Address space map 

psig

Signal actions 

pstack

Hex+symbolic stack trace 

ptime

Process time using microstate accounting 

ptree

Process trees that contain the process 

pwait

Status information after a process terminates 

pwdx

Current working directory for a process 

Note -

To avoid typing long command names, add the process tool directory to your PATH variable. This enables you to run process tools by entering only the last part of each file name (for example, pwdx instead of /usr/proc/bin/pwdx).

How to Display Information About Processes

  1. (Optional) Use output from the pgrep command to obtain the identification number of the process you want to display more information about. 


    # pgrep process

    process

    Name of the process you want to display more information about. 

    The process identification number is in the first column of the output.

  2. Use the appropriate /usr/bin/proc command to display the information you need. 


    # /usr/proc/bin/pcommand pid

    pcommand

    Process tool command you want to run. Table 35-2 lists these commands.

    pid

    Identification number of a process. 

Examples--Displaying Information About Processes

The following example shows how to use process tool commands to display more information about an lpsched process. First, the /usr/proc/bin path is defined to avoid typing long process tool commands. Next, the identification number for lpsched is obtained. Finally, output from three process tool commands is shown. 


# PATH=$PATH:/usr/proc/bin
# export PATH 1
# ps -e | grep lpsched 2
207 ?        0:00 /usr/lib/lpsched
# pwdx 191 3
207:    /
# ptree 191 4
207   /usr/lib/lpsched
# pfiles 191 5
207:    /usr/lib/lpsched
  Current rlimit: 4096 file descriptors
   0: S_IFIFO mode:0000 dev:179,0 ino:70 uid:0 gid:0 size:0
      O_RDWR
   1: S_IFIFO mode:0000 dev:179,0 ino:70 uid:0 gid:0 size:0
      O_RDWR
   3: S_IFCHR mode:0666 dev:32,8 ino:11446 uid:0 gid:3 rdev:21,0
      O_WRONLY FD_CLOEXEC
   4: S_IFDOOR mode:0444 dev:183,0 ino:59515 uid:0 gid:0 size:0
      O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE FD_CLOEXEC  door to nscd[201]
   5: S_IFREG mode:0664 dev:32,9 ino:1330 uid:71 gid:8 size:0
      O_WRONLY

  1. Adds the /usr/proc/bin directory to the PATH variable.

  2. Obtains the process identification number for lpsched.

  3. Displays the current working directory for lpsched.

  4. Displays the process tree containing lpsched.

  5. Displays fstat and fcntl information.

The following example shows output from the pwait command, which waits until a process terminates, then displays information about what happened. The following example shows output from the pwait command after a Command Tool window was exited. 


$ ps -e | grep cmdtool
  273 console 0:01 cmdtool
  277 console 0:01 cmdtool
  281 console 0:01 cmdtool
$ pwait -v 281
281: terminated, wait status 0x0000