Procps

For installation instructions see the Section called Installing Procps-3.1.11 in Chapter 6.

Official Download Location

Procps (3.1.11):
http://procps.sourceforge.net/

Procps Patch (3.1.11):
http://downloads.linuxfromscratch.org

Contents of Procps

(Last checked against version 2.0.7.)

The Procps package provides programs to monitor and halt system processes. Procps gathers information about processes via the /proc directory.

Procps installs the following:

Program Files

free, kill, oldps, pgrep, pkill, ps, skill, snice, sysctl, tload, top, vmstat, w and watch

Library Files

libproc.so

Descriptions

(Last checked against version 2.0.7.)

Program file descriptions

free

free displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap memory in the system, as well as the shared memory and buffers used by the kernel.

kill

kills sends signals to processes.

oldps and ps

ps gives a snapshot of the current processes.

pgrep

pgrep looks up processes based on name and other attributes.

pkill

pkill signals processes based on name and other attributes.

skill

skill sends signals to process matching a criteria.

snice

snice changes the scheduling priority for process matching a criteria.

sysctl

sysctl modifies kernel parameters at runtime.

tload

tload prints a graph of the current system load average to the specified tty or, if none is specified, the tty of the tload process.

top

top provides an ongoing look at processor activity in real time.

vmstat

vmstat reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps and cpu activity.

w

w displays information about the users, and their processes, currently on the machine.

watch

watch runs command repeatedly, displaying its output (the first screen full).

Library file descriptions

libproc

libproc is the library against which most of the programs in this set are linked to save disk space by implementing common functions only once.

Procps Installation Dependencies

(Last checked against version 2.0.7.)

Bash: sh
Binutils: as, ld, strip
Coreutils: basename, install, ln, mv, pwd, rm, sort, tr
Gawk: awk
GCC: cc1, collect2, cpp0, gcc
Grep: grep
Make: make
Sed: sed