I've just been through the massive long process this morning of trying to identify a running application. It was for the purpose of reporting a bug this morning, but I ended up posting a question about it to AskUbuntu instead.
I fluked finding the answer this time.
I tried starting gnome-system-monitor
(published name: "System Monitor"), but I couldn't work out which was the application I was looking for.
I tried going to the application's menu > About but is doesn't show the actual name of the application there. Here's a screenshot of gnome-software
> About, which only shows the published name of "Ubuntu Software".
I did a web search for "ubuntu software" to see if any search results showed the name of the application. I found a Wikipedia page that says "Development was ended in 2015 and in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS it was replaced with GNOME Software instead". I followed the link to GNOME Software but the name of the application is not shown there either.
Therefore I wasn't able to report the bug, so I came to AskUbuntu. I did a search for "ubuntu software" and saw the name "gnome-software" somewhere.
I opened a terminal, used the command gnome-software
, and the correct application started.
I ended up asking a question in AskUbuntu instead of reporting the bug. However, I have had this same problem many times over the last 10 years or so, and I would dearly like to solve it once and for all.
Is there a quick and easy way to identify the actual name of a currently running application?
PS This question was marked as a duplicate "This question already has an answer here:
How do I determine an application's process name? 1 answer", which effectively answers "No" to my question "Is there a quick and easy way to identify the actual name of a currently running application?", but in actual fact the answer I received from @waltinator seems to provide a method (via xprop
command).