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PS(1P) POSIX Programmer's Manual PS(1P)

PROLOG
This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface may differ (con-
sult the corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface may not be implemented on
Linux.

NAME
ps - report process status

SYNOPSIS
ps [-aA][-defl][-G grouplist][-o format]...[-p proclist][-t termlist]

[-U userlist][-g grouplist][-n namelist][-u userlist]

DESCRIPTION
The ps utility shall write information about processes, subject to having the appropriate privileges to obtain informa-
tion about those processes.

By default, ps shall select all processes with the same effective user ID as the current user and the same controlling
terminal as the invoker.

OPTIONS
The ps utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Section 12.2, Utility Syntax Guide-
lines.

The following options shall be supported:

-a Write information for all processes associated with terminals. Implementations may omit session leaders from this
list.

-A Write information for all processes.

-d Write information for all processes, except session leaders.

-e Write information for all processes. (Equivalent to -A.)

-f Generate a full listing. (See the STDOUT section for the contents of a full listing.)

-g grouplist
Write information for processes whose session leaders are given in grouplist. The application shall ensure that
the grouplist is a single argument in the form of a <blank> or comma-separated list.

-G grouplist
Write information for processes whose real group ID numbers are given in grouplist. The application shall ensure
that the grouplist is a single argument in the form of a <blank> or comma-separated list.

-l Generate a long listing. (See STDOUT for the contents of a long listing.)

-n namelist
Specify the name of an alternative system namelist file in place of the default. The name of the default file and
the format of a namelist file are unspecified.

-o format
Write information according to the format specification given in format. This is fully described in the STDOUT
section. Multiple -o options can be specified; the format specification shall be interpreted as the <space>-sepa-
rated concatenation of all the format option-arguments.

-p proclist
Write information for processes whose process ID numbers are given in proclist. The application shall ensure that
the proclist is a single argument in the form of a <blank> or comma-separated list.

-t termlist
Write information for processes associated with terminals given in termlist. The application shall ensure that the
termlist is a single argument in the form of a <blank> or comma-separated list. Terminal identifiers shall be
given in an implementation-defined format. On XSI-conformant systems, they shall be given in one of two forms:
the device's filename (for example, tty04) or, if the device's filename starts with tty, just the identifier fol-
lowing the characters tty (for example, "04" ).

-u userlist
Write information for processes whose user ID numbers or login names are given in userlist. The application shall
ensure that the userlist is a single argument in the form of a <blank> or comma-separated list. In the listing,
the numerical user ID shall be written unless the -f option is used, in which case the login name shall be writ-
ten.

-U userlist
Write information for processes whose real user ID numbers or login names are given in userlist. The application
shall ensure that the userlist is a single argument in the form of a <blank> or comma-separated list.

With the exception of -o format, all of the options shown are used to select processes. If any are specified, the default
list shall be ignored and ps shall select the processes represented by the inclusive OR of all the selection-criteria
options.

OPERANDS
None.

STDIN
Not used.

INPUT FILES
None.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The following environment variables shall affect the execution of ps:

COLUMNS
Override the system-selected horizontal display line size, used to determine the number of text columns to dis-
play. See the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Chapter 8, Environment Variables for valid values
and results when it is unset or null.

LANG Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See the Base Definitions
volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Section 8.2, Internationalization Variables for the precedence of international-
ization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)

LC_ALL If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.

LC_CTYPE
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-
byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).

LC_MESSAGES
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to stan-
dard error and informative messages written to standard output.

LC_TIME
Determine the format and contents of the date and time strings displayed.

NLSPATH
Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .

TZ Determine the timezone used to calculate date and time strings displayed. If TZ is unset or null, an unspecified
default timezone shall be used.

ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS
Default.

STDOUT
When the -o option is not specified, the standard output format is unspecified.

On XSI-conformant systems, the output format shall be as follows. The column headings and descriptions of the columns in
a ps listing are given below. The precise meanings of these fields are implementation-defined. The letters 'f' and 'l'
(below) indicate the option ( full or long) that shall cause the corresponding heading to appear; all means that the
heading always appears. Note that these two options determine only what information is provided for a process; they do
not determine which processes are listed.

F (l) Flags (octal and additive) associated
with the process.
S (l) The state of the process.
UID (f,l) The user ID number of the process owner;
the login name is printed under the -f
option.
PID (all) The process ID of the process; it is
possible to kill a process if this datum
is known.
PPID (f,l) The process ID of the parent process.
C (f,l) Processor utilization for scheduling.
PRI (l) The priority of the process; higher num-
bers mean lower priority.
NI (l) Nice value; used in priority computa-
tion.
ADDR (l) The address of the process.
SZ (l) The size in blocks of the core image of
the process.
WCHAN (l) The event for which the process is wait-
ing or sleeping; if blank, the process
is running.
STIME (f) Starting time of the process.
TTY (all) The controlling terminal for the
process.
TIME (all) The cumulative execution time for the
process.
CMD (all) The command name; the full command name
and its arguments are written under the
-f option.

A process that has exited and has a parent, but has not yet been waited for by the parent, shall be marked defunct.

Under the option -f, ps tries to determine the command name and arguments given when the process was created by examining
memory or the swap area. Failing this, the command name, as it would appear without the option -f, is written in square
brackets.

The -o option allows the output format to be specified under user control.

The application shall ensure that the format specification is a list of names presented as a single argument, <blank> or
comma-separated. Each variable has a default header. The default header can be overridden by appending an equals sign and
the new text of the header. The rest of the characters in the argument shall be used as the header text. The fields spec-
ified shall be written in the order specified on the command line, and should be arranged in columns in the output. The
field widths shall be selected by the system to be at least as wide as the header text (default or overridden value). If
the header text is null, such as -o user=, the field width shall be at least as wide as the default header text. If all
header text fields are null, no header line shall be written.

The following names are recognized in the POSIX locale:

ruser The real user ID of the process. This shall be the textual user ID, if it can be obtained and the field width per-
mits, or a decimal representation otherwise.

user The effective user ID of the process. This shall be the textual user ID, if it can be obtained and the field width
permits, or a decimal representation otherwise.

rgroup The real group ID of the process. This shall be the textual group ID, if it can be obtained and the field width
permits, or a decimal representation otherwise.

group The effective group ID of the process. This shall be the textual group ID, if it can be obtained and the field
width permits, or a decimal representation otherwise.

pid The decimal value of the process ID.

ppid The decimal value of the parent process ID.

pgid The decimal value of the process group ID.

pcpu The ratio of CPU time used recently to CPU time available in the same period, expressed as a percentage. The mean-
ing of "recently" in this context is unspecified. The CPU time available is determined in an unspecified manner.

vsz The size of the process in (virtual) memory in 1024 byte units as a decimal integer.

nice The decimal value of the nice value of the process; see nice() .

etime In the POSIX locale, the elapsed time since the process was started, in the form:

[[dd-]hh:]mm:ss

where dd shall represent the number of days, hh the number of hours, mm the number of minutes, and ss the number of sec-
onds. The dd field shall be a decimal integer. The hh, mm, and ss fields shall be two-digit decimal integers padded on
the left with zeros.

time In the POSIX locale, the cumulative CPU time of the process in the form:

[dd-]hh:mm:ss

The dd, hh, mm, and ss fields shall be as described in the etime specifier.

tty The name of the controlling terminal of the process (if any) in the same format used by the who utility.

comm The name of the command being executed ( argv[0] value) as a string.

args The command with all its arguments as a string. The implementation may truncate this value to the field width; it
is implementation-defined whether any further truncation occurs. It is unspecified whether the string represented
is a version of the argument list as it was passed to the command when it started, or is a version of the argu-
ments as they may have been modified by the application. Applications cannot depend on being able to modify their
argument list and having that modification be reflected in the output of ps.

Any field need not be meaningful in all implementations. In such a case a hyphen ( '-' ) should be output in place of the
field value.

Only comm and args shall be allowed to contain <blank>s; all others shall not. Any implementation-defined variables shall
be specified in the system documentation along with the default header and indicating whether the field may contain
<blank>s.

The following table specifies the default header to be used in the POSIX locale corresponding to each format specifier.

Table: Variable Names and Default Headers in ps

Format Specifier Default Header Format Specifier Default Header
args COMMAND ppid PPID
comm COMMAND rgroup RGROUP
etime ELAPSED ruser RUSER
group GROUP time TIME
nice NI tty TT
pcpu %CPU user USER
pgid PGID vsz VSZ
pid PID

STDERR
The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

OUTPUT FILES
None.

EXTENDED DESCRIPTION
None.

EXIT STATUS
The following exit values shall be returned:

0 Successful completion.

>0 An error occurred.

CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS
Default.

The following sections are informative.

APPLICATION USAGE
Things can change while ps is running; the snapshot it gives is only true for an instant, and might not be accurate by
the time it is displayed.

The args format specifier is allowed to produce a truncated version of the command arguments. In some implementations,
this information is no longer available when the ps utility is executed.

If the field width is too narrow to display a textual ID, the system may use a numeric version. Normally, the system
would be expected to choose large enough field widths, but if a large number of fields were selected to write, it might
squeeze fields to their minimum sizes to fit on one line. One way to ensure adequate width for the textual IDs is to
override the default header for a field to make it larger than most or all user or group names.

There is no special quoting mechanism for header text. The header text is the rest of the argument. If multiple header
changes are needed, multiple -o options can be used, such as:

ps -o "user=User Name" -o pid=Process\ ID

On some implementations, especially multi-level secure systems, ps may be severely restricted and produce information
only about child processes owned by the user.

EXAMPLES
The command:

ps -o user,pid,ppid=MOM -o args

writes at least the following in the POSIX locale:

USER PID MOM COMMAND
helene 34 12 ps -o uid,pid,ppid=MOM -o args

The contents of the COMMAND field need not be the same in all implementations, due to possible truncation.

RATIONALE
There is very little commonality between BSD and System V implementations of ps. Many options conflict or have subtly
different usages. The standard developers attempted to select a set of options for the base standard that were useful on
a wide range of systems and selected options that either can be implemented on both BSD and System V-based systems with-
out breaking the current implementations or where the options are sufficiently similar that any changes would not be
unduly problematic for users or implementors.

It is recognized that on some implementations, especially multi-level secure systems, ps may be nearly useless. The
default output has therefore been chosen such that it does not break historical implementations and also is likely to
provide at least some useful information on most systems.

The major change is the addition of the format specification capability. The motivation for this invention is to provide
a mechanism for users to access a wider range of system information, if the system permits it, in a portable manner. The
fields chosen to appear in this volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 were arrived at after considering what concepts were
likely to be both reasonably useful to the "average" user and had a reasonable chance of being implemented on a wide
range of systems. Again it is recognized that not all systems are able to provide all the information and, conversely,
some may wish to provide more. It is hoped that the approach adopted will be sufficiently flexible and extensible to
accommodate most systems. Implementations may be expected to introduce new format specifiers.

The default output should consist of a short listing containing the process ID, terminal name, cumulative execution time,
and command name of each process.

The preference of the standard developers would have been to make the format specification an operand of the ps command.
Unfortunately, BSD usage precluded this.

At one time a format was included to display the environment array of the process. This was deleted because there is no
portable way to display it.

The -A option is equivalent to the BSD -g and the SVID -e. Because the two systems differed, a mnemonic compromise was
selected.

The -a option is described with some optional behavior because the SVID omits session leaders, but BSD does not.

In an early proposal, format specifiers appeared for priority and start time. The former was not defined adequately in
this volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 and was removed in deference to the defined nice value; the latter because elapsed
time was considered to be more useful.

In a new BSD version of ps, a -O option can be used to write all of the default information, followed by additional for-
mat specifiers. This was not adopted because the default output is implementation-defined. Nevertheless, this is a useful
option that should be reserved for that purpose. In the -o option for the POSIX Shell and Utilities ps, the format is the
concatenation of each -o. Therefore, the user can have an alias or function that defines the beginning of their desired
format and add more fields to the end of the output in certain cases where that would be useful.

The format of the terminal name is unspecified, but the descriptions of ps, talk, who, and write require that they all
use the same format.

The pcpu field indicates that the CPU time available is determined in an unspecified manner. This is because it is diffi-
cult to express an algorithm that is useful across all possible machine architectures. Historical counterparts to this
value have attempted to show percentage of use in the recent past, such as the preceding minute. Frequently, these values
for all processes did not add up to 100%. Implementations are encouraged to provide data in this field to users that will
help them identify processes currently affecting the performance of the system.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS
None.