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Process Management

  • Background : Ctrl + z, jobs and bg
  • Foreground : fg
  • Run process even after exit : nohup process & or nohup process > /dev/null 2>&1 &
  • Kill a process by name = pkill
  • Process priority : nice
    • The niceness scale goes from -20 to 19. The lower the number, more priority the that task gets.
  • Process monitoring : top

  • List process : ps

  • jobs 

    View jobs spawned by the current shell:

      jobs

  List jobs and their process IDs:

      jobs -l

  Display information about jobs with changed status:

      jobs -n

  Display process ID of process group leader:

      jobs -p

  Display running processes:

      jobs -r

  Display stopped processes:

      jobs -s

  • bg 

    Resume the most recently suspended job and run it in the background:

      bg

  Resume a specific job (use `jobs -l` to get its ID) and run it in the background:

      bg %job_id

  • nohup 

    Run a process that can live beyond the terminal:

      nohup command argument1 argument2 ...

  Launch `nohup` in background mode:

      nohup command argument1 argument2 ... &

  Run a shell script that can live beyond the terminal:

      nohup path/to/script.sh &

  Run a process and write the output to a specific file:

      nohup command argument1 argument2 ... > path/to/output_file &

  • pkill 

    Kill all processes which match:

      pkill "process_name"

  Kill all processes which match their full command instead of just the process name:

      pkill -f "command_name"

  Force kill matching processes (can not be blocked):

      pkill -9 "process_name"

  Send SIGUSR1 signal to processes which match:

      pkill -USR1 "process_name"

  Kill the main `firefox` process to close the browser:

      pkill --oldest "firefox"

  • nice 

    Launch a program with altered priority:

      nice -n niceness_value command

  1. Process Commands