Managing Processes and Jobs

The ps command

The ps command, short for “process status,” shows us the running processes on the computer, as well as information about who’s running them. It’s good for finding out what’s currently running and for identifying a process ID with a program so we can stop it.

The ps command takes different options based on which OS we’re using. In this course, we’ll cover the Linux options, which also work on macOS.

When we execute the ps command without any arguments, we see the processes running in our current session:

ps