Chapter 8: Processes

See what is running, control jobs and signals, and judge and tune how processes share the machine.

What you will learn

• Explain processes, PIDs and states, and list and trace them with ps, pstree and /proc.
• Run commands in the background and control them with jobs, fg, bg and nohup.
• Send signals with kill, pkill and killall, and end processes safely with the right escalation.
• Read load average, top and free, change priority with nice and renice, and select a tuned profile.

Sections

1. What a process is
2. Exercise: Find your way around the process table
3. Jobs and the background
4. Exercise: Juggle jobs in one terminal
5. Signals and ending processes
6. Exercise: Stop a runaway process the right way
7. Monitoring load and setting priorities
8. Exercise: Find the slowdown and tune the server
9. Exercise: Processes review
10. Linux processes quiz
11. Linux processes cheat sheet