Command line and full screen utilities for browsing procfs, a "pseudo" file system dynamically generated by Linux to provide information about the status of entries in its process table.
625d0809da
Original report: When trying kill a process with insufficient privileges (see blow), pkill displays the error message “... failed: Operation not permitted”, but returns 0. Surely it should return 3? $ pkill syslogd ; echo $? pkill: killing pid 373 failed: Operation not permitted 0 Return value 0 means one of more things matched. For a pgrep (which shares code with pkill) this makes sense, there was a match. It seems wrong for pkill to return 0 when it in fact could not do what you told it to. However return value 3 means a fatal error and it's not fatal. Looking at other programs when trying to kill things it cannot kill. shell kill returns 1, procps kill returns 1, killall returns 1, skill returns 0 (and says it was successful!, ah well poor old skill) The consensus seems to be that you return 1 if you cannot kill it, even if you found it. In other words the return value for both not found and not able to kill it is the same. pkill only returns 0 if something was killed. This means we found a match AND the kill() system call worked too. References: https://bugs.debian.org/852758 Signed-off-by: Craig Small <csmall@enc.com.au> |
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contrib | ||
Documentation | ||
include | ||
lib | ||
man-po | ||
misc | ||
po | ||
proc | ||
ps | ||
testsuite | ||
top | ||
.gitignore | ||
.gitlab-ci.yml | ||
AUTHORS | ||
autogen.sh | ||
ChangeLog | ||
configure.ac | ||
COPYING | ||
COPYING.LIB | ||
create-man-pot.sh | ||
free.1 | ||
free.c | ||
INSTALL.md | ||
kill.1 | ||
Makefile.am | ||
NEWS | ||
pgrep.1 | ||
pgrep.c | ||
pidof.1 | ||
pidof.c | ||
pkill.1 | ||
pmap.1 | ||
pmap.c | ||
pwdx.1 | ||
pwdx.c | ||
README.md | ||
skill.1 | ||
skill.c | ||
slabtop.1 | ||
slabtop.c | ||
snice.1 | ||
sysctl.8 | ||
sysctl.c | ||
sysctl.conf | ||
sysctl.conf.5 | ||
tload.1 | ||
tload.c | ||
translate-man.sh | ||
uptime.1 | ||
uptime.c | ||
vmstat.8 | ||
vmstat.c | ||
w.1 | ||
w.c | ||
watch.1 | ||
watch.c |
procps
procps is a set of command line and full-screen utilities that provide information out of the pseudo-filesystem most commonly located at /proc. This filesystem provides a simple interface to the kernel data structures. The programs of procps generally concentrate on the structures that describe the processess running on the system.
The following programs are found in procps:
- free - Report the amount of free and used memory in the system
- kill - Send a signal to a process based on PID
- pgrep - List processes based on name or other attributes
- pkill - Send a signal to a process based on name or other attributes
- pmap - Report memory map of a process
- ps - Report information of processes
- pwdx - Report current directory of a process
- skill - Obsolete version of pgrep/pkill
- slabtop - Display kernel slab cache information in real time
- snice - Renice a process
- sysctl - Read or Write kernel parameters at run-time
- tload - Graphical representation of system load average
- top - Dynamic real-time view of running processes
- uptime - Display how long the system has been running
- vmstat - Report virtual memory statistics
- w - Report logged in users and what they are doing
- watch - Execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen
Reporting Bugs
There are a few ways of reporting bugs or feature requests:
- Your distributions bug reporter. If you are using a distribution your first port of call is their bug tracker. This is because each distribution has their own patches and way of dealing with bugs. Also bug reporting often does not need any subscription to websites.
- GitLab Issues - To the left of this page is the issue tracker. You can report bugs here.
- Email list - We have an email list (see below) where you can report bugs. The problem with this method is bug reports often get lost and cannot be tracked. This is especially a big problem when its something that will take time to resolve.
If you need to report bugs, there is more details on the Bug Reporting page.
Email List
The email list for the developers and users of procps is found at http://www.freelists.org/archive/procps/ This email list discusses the development of procps and is used by distributions to also forward or discuss bugs.