A computer program is a passive collection of instructions; a process is the actual execution of those instructions.
17
votes
4answers
8k views
Running programs in the background from terminal
How do I run a program in the background of a shell, with the ability to close the shell while leaving the program running?
Lets say my UI is having problems or for some reason, I need to boot up a ...
15
votes
9answers
11k views
How can I capture network traffic of a single process?
I would like to examine the network traffic being handled by a single process, but simple network captures won't work since I am dealing with such a busy system (lots of other traffic happening at the ...
34
votes
2answers
19k views
What are zombie processes?
With commands like top and the gui based System Monitor I can see that at the moment I have several zombie processes.
What are zombie processes?
Do they affect the performance of the system or the ...
23
votes
5answers
21k views
Is there any way to kill a zombie process without reboot?
Is there any way to kill a zombie process without reboot?Here is how it happens:
I wanted to download a 12GB torrent.After adding the .torrent file, transmission turned into a zombie process.I tried ...
20
votes
2answers
7k views
What is the “Waiting Channel” of a process?
In the GNOME System Monitor's Processes tab there is a "Waiting Channel" column. By far the most common values I see here is poll_schedule_timeout , but I also see other values: 0, do_exit, do_wait, ...
10
votes
4answers
7k views
Is ubuntu-geoip (GeoClue) used for tracking?
I am happily learning Ubuntu more closely now. I came across the process ubuntu-geoip-provider in system monitor.
Is is used for tracking or for gathering nearest server info, or for syncing time ...
3
votes
3answers
224 views
How do I know which file a program is trying to access?
I have a program which I am trying to run, however when I run it; it just complains that it can't find a particular file.
However I have no idea which folder it is trying to find this particular file ...
7
votes
2answers
926 views
Find which files are read or written to
I want to see which files are read or written to.
Is there any program or a command for that? I can remember I used this method to hunt down viruses and malware hiding locations when I used windows a ...
10
votes
2answers
23k views
Why does Chrome have so many processes on my machine?
I've got almost 20 processes for google chrome (whilst only having 4 tabs open, all with barebones HTML) , all hogging memory and either saying futex_wait_queue_me or poll_schedule_timeout.
My fan ...
5
votes
1answer
470 views
How can I find out which programs have modified a file over some period of time?
I'd like to better understand which programs are modifying a specific file1 during a reboot. Can I set something up to log this kind of information?
Polling for which processes currently have the ...
10
votes
3answers
6k views
How to kill the process that 'sudo kill -9' can't kill without reboot?
I have tried to kill the process:
sam@sam-desktop:~$ ps -aux|grep sda
Warning: bad ps syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See http://procps.sf.net/faq.html
root 2898 0.0 0.0 0 0 ...
1
vote
1answer
91 views
Is there a program that bans me from using a program for a certain amount of time?
So school just restarted and i'm crazy addicted to league of Legend. Is there anyway I can block myself from running it for like 1-2 days. I'm looking for a program. I believe there is one like this ...
2
votes
2answers
2k views
What is process “/usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch -background none”?
I am experiencing some serious performance issues with my Ubuntu 12.04 setup and thus looking for the culprit by running htop alongside my usual tasks.
Aside from the usual suspects like chromium, ...
32
votes
4answers
6k views
What's the difference between 'killall' and 'pkill'?
After using just plain kill <some_pid> on Unix systems for many years, I learned pkill from a younger Linux-savvy co-worker colleague1.
I soon accepted the Linux-way, pgrep-ing and pkill-ing ...
5
votes
2answers
2k views
Automatically kill a process if it exceeds a given amount of RAM
I work on large-scale datasets. When testing new software, a script will sometimes sneak up on me, quickly grab all available RAM, and render my desktop unusable. I'd like a way to set a RAM limit ...
16
votes
2answers
2k views
What does 'Nice' mean on the processes tab
What does the 'Nice' column represent on the processes tab of the system monitor?
8
votes
3answers
4k views
Best practice to identify and kill hanging process, when system hangs and reacts slowly on user input?
Recently when I tried to open a video with VLC, my system slowed down, the open applications webbrowser, VLC and filemanager and others didn't react any longer. The mouse just reacted still very ...
5
votes
3answers
738 views
Killing a running process in an Ubuntu machine remotely from a windows machine which is in LAN
Is it possible to kill a process running in an Ubuntu machine from a Windows(XP) machine remotely connected via LAN ?
I can kill the process in a windows machine from a remote windows machine (in ...
0
votes
1answer
1k views
XAMPP: Deamon is already running, but it's NOT apache
This one is giving me a headache...
I have installed XAMPP for Linux 1.7.7 on Ubuntu 12.10. I haven't installed the latest version because of the new security "feature" which makes XAMPP so secure I ...
15
votes
3answers
36k views
Why is ksoftirqd/0 process using all my cpu?
I was feeling ubuntu was running a bit sluggish, and then I went to see the processes running on it, and found one which was using something like 50% of cpu called ksoftirqd/0. Does anyone know what ...
8
votes
4answers
1k views
Tell a process PID by it's window?
how I can tell a process image name (to run from Terminal using sudo) showing on the Ubuntu UI ?
4
votes
3answers
11k views
How to deal with a frozen screen? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
What should I do when Ubuntu freezes?
My OS is Ubuntu 12.04. Sometimes the screen suddenly becomes frozen, except that the mouse can move around. I have no choice but to ...
4
votes
1answer
8k views
What are kswapd0, kworker/num:num, ksoftirqd/num?
Exactly what are these services / programs. Apparently they make my system almost useless.
Any one of them at point of time uses at least 50% CPU and continuous access to HDD.
I'm not exactly sure ...
2
votes
1answer
419 views
How to set CPU affinity to a process
How can I set how many physical CPUs can a process use (CPU Affinity) before the process starts.
1
vote
1answer
72 views
process id from window id
When i run xprop -id <wid> on a given windows id for an opengl application (Ubuntu 12.04) i get a bunch of properties, but i don't see _NET_WM_PID;
$ xprop -id 0x4a00002
...
1
vote
1answer
5k views
How to find the Process ID (PID) of a running terminal program?
I am running a program in the terminal that I can't escape with Ctrl-C and that I want to kill. How can I find its PID?
