Slash Proc - File System Utilities

One of the commonly used linux terminal commands are mostly the linux system and monitoring linux tools. Everybody who has been with linux for quite long time, knows that there are lots of built-in linux monitoring tools that comes free and handy from default linux OS installation.

One package that comes with a bunch of linux monitoring commands is procps package.

procps is the package that has a bunch of small useful utilities that give information about processes using, that is why it being referred to forward slash proc filesystem, the /proc filesystem.

The procps package contains a set of system utilities that provide system information. Procps includes ps, free, skill, pkill, pgrep, snice, tload, top, uptime, vmstat, w, watch and pdwx.

The ps command displays a snapshot of running processes.

The top command provides a repetitive update of the statuses of running processes.

The free command displays the amounts of free and used memory on your system.

The skill command sends a terminate command (or another specified signal) to a specified set of processes.

The snice command is used to change the scheduling priority of specified processes.

The tload command prints a graph of the current system load average to a specified tty.

The uptime command displays the current time, how long the system has been running, how many users are logged on, and system load averages for the past one, five, and fifteen minutes.

The w command displays a list of the users who are currently logged on and what they are running.

The watch program watches a running program.

The vmstat command displays virtual memory statistics about processes, memory, paging, block I/O, traps, and CPU activity.

The pwdx command reports the current working directory of a process or processes.

By default Fedora installation, procps is being installed.

Procps Installation

# yum -y install procps

That is all folks.

Related Readings:

Basic Proactive Linux Monitoring
Monitoring USB Devices
Proactive Log File Growth Monitoring
Being Aware of Logged On Users
Linux Process Kill
Linux Process Prioritization and Management
Linux Statistics and Resource Tool
Linux FileSystem Status