Hi, when i do a : ps -ef | grep username then what is the meaning of each column ? I wanna know the size of the memory that a process X is using, its proc id (these are the most important i'm concerned with, but i'd to know abt other colums too).. please have a look at this example: %ps -ef | grep me me 3583 2702 0 11:53:29 pts/131 0:00 /usr/bin/perl ./forkproc2.pl please number the column from left to right, start from 1 (since some programmers have the habit to number things from 0 :). say, column 1 is "me" , i.e:my username column 2 is "3583" ,i.e : proc id ?? something like that... thanks a lot everyone

1:user id 2:Proccess id 3:parents proccess id 4:proccessor utilization(obsolete) 5:process starting time 6:terminal controlling proccess 7:cumulative execution time 8:full command Thats basiclly it... Scott

Hi Scott, is 4 (proc utilization) the resource that this process is using i.e amount of RAM ?

It is not related to memory resources being used. It is used for sharing CPU resources among processes. So 4 would be a value used to determine when the process is able to utilize the cpu. Think of it as a way for the cpu to prioritize tasks. Scott

Do "man ps" to see column definitions. If you do "ps -efl", the 10th column is memory size (on HP-UX anyway). This is the number of memory pages, the default page size being 4KB. You can confirm the configured memory page size on an HP-UX box with: grep physical /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log And by the way, that 8th column is not really the "full command" but only the first part of the command (roughly 62 characters).

I concur with James... simply do a "man ps" command to adapt the output to your particular flavor of Unix. Reading through the man pages will also provide you with possible switches you could use to pull back only the info you want. Linux ex: ps -eo %mem,pid,user,args These switches will only pull back memory, the pid, the user, and the arguments. Hope this helps, Dallas.