ps

SYNOPSIS
ps [options]

DESCRIPTION
ps displays information about a selection of the active processes. If you want a repetitive update of the
selection and the displayed information, use top(1) instead.

This version of ps accepts several kinds of options:
1 UNIX options, which may be grouped and must be preceded by a dash.
2 BSD options, which may be grouped and must not be used with a dash.
3 GNU long options, which are preceded by two dashes.

Options of different types may be freely mixed, but conflicts can appear. There are some synonymous options, which
are functionally identical, due to the many standards and ps implementations that this ps is compatible with.

Note that "ps -aux" is distinct from "ps aux". The POSIX and UNIX standards require that "ps -aux" print all
processes owned by a user named "x", as well as printing all processes that would be selected by the -a option. If
the user named "x" does not exist, this ps may interpret the command as "ps aux" instead and print a warning. This
behavior is intended to aid in transitioning old scripts and habits. It is fragile, subject to change, and thus
should not be relied upon.

By default, ps selects all processes with the same effective user ID (euid=EUID) as the current user and
associated with the same terminal as the invoker. It displays the process ID (pid=PID), the terminal associated
with the process (tname=TTY), the cumulated CPU time in [dd-]hh:mm:ss format (time=TIME), and the executable name
(ucmd=CMD). Output is unsorted by default.

The use of BSD-style options will add process state (stat=STAT) to the default display and show the command args
(args=COMMAND) instead of the executable name. You can override this with the PS_FORMAT environment variable. The
use of BSD-style options will also change the process selection to include processes on other terminals (TTYs)
that are owned by you; alternately, this may be described as setting the selection to be the set of all processes
filtered to exclude processes owned by other users or not on a terminal. These effects are not considered when
options are described as being "identical" below, so -M will be considered identical to Z and so on.

Except as described below, process selection options are additive. The default selection is discarded, and then
the selected processes are added to the set of processes to be displayed. A process will thus be shown if it meets
any of the given selection criteria.

EXAMPLES
To see every process on the system using standard syntax:
ps -e
ps -ef
ps -eF
ps -ely

To see every process on the system using BSD syntax:
ps ax
ps axu

To print a process tree:
ps -ejH
ps axjf

To get info about threads:
ps -eLf
ps axms

To get security info:
ps -eo euser,ruser,suser,fuser,f,comm,label
ps axZ
ps -eM

To see every process running as root (real & effective ID) in user format:
ps -U root -u root u

To see every process with a user-defined format:
ps -eo pid,tid,class,rtprio,ni,pri,psr,pcpu,stat,wchan:14,comm
ps axo stat,euid,ruid,tty,tpgid,sess,pgrp,ppid,pid,pcpu,comm
ps -eopid,tt,user,fname,tmout,f,wchan

Print only the process IDs of syslogd:
ps -C syslogd -o pid=

Print only the name of PID 42:
ps -p 42 -o comm=