Category: procps

  • Linux Memory Statistics

    What does Used memory in Linux actually mean and how this concept has changed over the years.

  • Percent CPU for processes

    The ps program gives a snapshot of the processes running on your Unix-like system. On most Linux installations, this will be the ps program from the procps project. What does the %CPU field mean in the output of ps?

  • procps-ng 3.3.16

    procps-ng version 3.3.16 was released today. Besides some documentation and library updates, there were a few incremental changes. Zombie Hunting with pgrep Ever wanted to find zombies? Perhaps processes with other states? pgrep has a shiny new runstate flag to help you which will match process against the runstate. I’m curious to see the use-cases…

  • The sudo tty bug and procps

    There have been recent reports of a security bug in sudo (CVE-2017-1000367) where you can fool sudo into thinking what controlling terminal it is running on to bypass its security checks.  One of the first things I thought of was, is procps vulnerable to the same bug? Sure, it wouldn’t be a security bypass, but…

  • procps 3.3.12

    The procps developers are happy to announce that version 3.3.12 of procps was released today. This version has a mixture of bug fixes and enhancements. This unfortunately means another API bump but we are hoping this will be fixed with the new library API coming soon. procps is developed on gitlab and the new version…

  • Displaying Linux Memory

    Memory management is hard, but RAM management may be even harder. Most people know the vague overall concept of how memory usage is displayed within Linux. You have your total memory which is everything inside the box; then there is used and free which is what the system is or is not using respectively. Some…

  • pidof lost a shell

    pidof is a program that reports the PID of a process that has the given command line. It has an option x which means “scripts too”. The idea behind this is if you have a shell script it will find it. Recently there was an issue raised saying pidof was not finding a shell script.…

  • ps standards and locales

    I looked at two interesting issues today around the ps program in the procps project. One had a solution and the other I’m puzzled about. ps User-defined Format Issue #9 was quite the puzzle. The output of ps changed depending if a different option had a hyphen before it or not. First, the expected output…

  • procps 3.3.11

    I have updated NEWS, bumped the API and tagged in git; procps version 3.3.11 is now released! This release we have fixed many bugs and made procps more robust for those odd corner cases. See the NEWS file for details.  The most significant new feature in this release is the support for LXC containers in both…

  • Be careful with errno

    I’m getting close to releasing version 3.3.11 of procps.  When it gets near that time, I generally browse again the Debian Bug Tracker for procps bugs. Bug number #733758 caught my eye.  With the free command if you used the s option before the c option, the s option failed, “seconds argument ‘N’ failed” where…