procps – Small Dropbear

December 8, 2019Craig Blog

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 for this flag; it certainly will get used (e.g. find my zombies) but as some processes bounce in and out of states (think Run to Sleep and back) it might add some confusion.

Snice plays nice with PIDs

Speaking of ancient corpses, snice was not matching against PIDs. The best use for snice is to not use it (as the man page says) but some people do and some people noticed it never matched against PIDs.
The issue was reading the process state up to 128 bytes, but process state lines are always longer than 128 bytes so a bounds check failed and it skipped that PID (and every other PID too).

Top Enhancements

Top got a bunch of love again in this release. If you ever wanted your processes to be shown in fuchsia? Perhaps goldenrod? With some earlier versions of top, you could by directly editing the toprc file but now everyone can have more than the standard 8 colours!

If you use the other filters parameter for some fancy process filtering in top, it now will save that configuration.

Collapsed children (process names are weird) get some help. If you are in tree view, you can collapse or fold the children processes under the parent. Their CPU is also added to the parent so there are no “missing” CPU ticks.

For people who use the One True Editor (which is, of course, VIM) you can use the vim navigation keys to move through the process list.

Where to find it?

You’ll find the latest version of procps either at our git repository or download a tarball.

May 31, 2017Craig Blog 1 Comment

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 it would be a normal sort of bug. A lot of programs in procps have a concept of a controlling terminal, or the TTY field for either viewing or filtering, could they be fooled into thinking the process had a different controlling terminal?

Was I going to be in the same pickle as the sudo maintainers? The meat between the stat parsing sandwich? Can I find any more puns related somehow to the XKCD comic?

TLDR: No.

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 of procps can be found at https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/tree/newlib

procps 3.3.12 can be found at https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/tags/v3.3.12

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 people might know that not all used is used and some of it actually is free. It can be very confusing to understand, even for a someone who maintains procps (the package that contains top and free, two programs that display memory usage).

So, how does the memory display work?

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

$ ps p $$ -o pid=pid,comm=comm
 pid comm
31612 bash

Next, the unusual output.

$ ps -p $$ -o pid=pid,comm=comm
pid,comm=comm
 31612