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System Administration Guide

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. Table 63-2 lists these process tools. Refer to proc(1)for more information.

Table 63-2 /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 ps command to obtain the identification number of the process you want to display more information about. 


    # ps -e | grep 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 63-2 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. 


 [Adds the /usr/proc/bin directory to
the PATH variable. ] # PATH=$PATH:/usr/proc/bin
# export PATH
 [Obtains the process identification number for lpsched. ] # ps -e | grep lpsched
   191 ?        0:00 /usr/lib/lpsched
 [Displays the current working directory for lpsched.] # pwdx 191
 
191:    /
 [	Displays the process tree containing lpsched. ] # ptree 191
 
183   /usr/lib/lpsched
 [Displays fstat and fcntl
information. ] # pfiles 191
210:    /usr/lib/lpsched
  Current rlimit: 1024 file descriptors
   0: S_IFIFO mode:0000 dev:165,0 ino:83 uid:0 gid:0 size:0
      O_RDWR
   1: S_IFIFO mode:0000 dev:165,0 ino:83 uid:0 gid:0 size:0
      O_RDWR
   3: S_IFCHR mode:0666 dev:32,24 ino:34307 uid:0 gid:3 rdev:21,0
      O_WRONLY FD_CLOEXEC
   4: S_IFDOOR mode:0444 dev:171,0 ino:4124226512 uid:0 gid:0 
      size:0
      O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE FD_CLOEXEC  door to nscd[200]
   5: S_IFREG mode:0664 dev:32,24 ino:311 uid:71 gid:8 size:0
      O_WRONLY

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