How to Manage Linux Processes from the Command Terminal

The most important commands for managing Linux processes

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In Linux, an instance of a running program is referred to as a process. Each process on a Linux system is uniquely identified by a process ID (PID).

Linux provides us with several command-line tools for easily managing processes. This article covers tools such as top, ps, and kill.

Knowing how to manage processes is a critical part of system administration and or keeping your system in good shape.

Listing processes with ps

Apart from the process ID, each process also has other properties such as CPU utilization, memory usage, and time spent in the CPU, etc.

One of the ways you can display information about active processes is via the ps command. The processes are listed in a user-oriented format.

$ ps u

The output from the command above should be similar to the one below. Only processes associated with the user running the ps command are shown by default.