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View Running Processes from the Command Line
In this hands-on lab, we will practice finding and viewing processes running on a Linux system. Being able to locate a particular process and view its status is a fundamental component of systems administration.

Lab Info
Table of Contents
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Challenge
Determine How Many Processes Are Currently Running
Run the following command:
ps aux | grep -v grep | wc -l
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Challenge
Determine the Current System Load
Run one of the following commands:
uptime
cat /proc/loadavg
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Challenge
Determine How Many Processes Are Running as cloud_user
Run the following command:
ps -U cloud_user | wc -l
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Challenge
Determine the PID of the xfce4-session Process
Run the following command:
ps aux | grep xfce4-session | grep -v grep
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Challenge
Determine How Many Threads the xfce4-session Process Is Using
View the current threads reported in the PID's status. Replace
<PID_VALUE>
with the PID value obtained from the last objective (the value aftercloud_u+
):cat /proc/<PID_VALUE>/status | grep Threads
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Challenge
Write a Small Shell Script that Returns the Number of Threads in a Process
Create a new file named
/home/cloud_user/bin/threads.sh
, and add the following script:#!/bin/bash if [ -n $1 ] then _pid=$(ps aux | grep -E "$1\$" | grep -v grep | grep -v threads.sh | awk '{print $2}') cat /proc/$_pid/status | grep Threads fi
Make the script executable with
chmod u+x bin/threads.sh
.Determine the number of threads the
xfce4-session
process is running with./bin/threads.sh xfce4-session
.
About the author
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