I’d like to view information for processes running in OS X. Running ps in the terminal just lists the open Terminal windows. How can I see all processes that are running?
Say I’m running a web browser, terminal and text editor. I’d like to see information for the text editor and web browser.
Running ps -e does the trick. Found the answer here.
You can just use top
It will display everything running on your OSX
Using top and ps is okay, but I find that using htop is far better & clearer than the standard tools Mac OS X uses. My fave use is to hit the T key while it is running to view processes in tree view (see screenshot). Shows you what processes are co-dependent on other processes.
You can install it from Homebrew using:
brew install htop
And if you have Xcode and related tools such as git installed on your system and you want to install the latest development code from the official source repository—just follow these steps.
First clone the source code from the htop GitHub repository:
git clone git#github.com:hishamhm/htop.git
Now go into the repository directory:
cd htop
Run autogen.sh:
./autogen.sh
Run this configure command:
./configure
Once the configure process completes, run make:
make
Finally install it by running sudo make install:
sudo make install
Try ps -ef. man ps will give you all the options.
-A Display information about other users' processes, including those without controlling terminals.
-e Identical to -A.
-f Display the uid, pid, parent pid, recent CPU usage, process start time, controlling tty, elapsed CPU usage, and the associated command. If the -u option is also used, display
the user name rather then the numeric uid. When -o or -O is used to add to the display following -f, the command field is not truncated as severely as it is in other formats.
Try the top command. It's an interactive command that will display the running processes.
You may also use the Apple's "Activity Monitor" application (located in /Applications/Utilities/).
It provides an actually quite nice GUI. You can see all the running processes, filter them by users, get extended informations about them (CPU, memory, network, etc), monitor them, etc...
Probably your best choice, unless you want to stick with the terminal (in such a case, read the top or ps manual, as those commands have a bunch of options).
To sort by cpu usage: top -o cpu
if you are using ps, you can check the manual
man ps
there is a list of keywords allowing you to build what you need. for example to show, userid / processid / percent cpu / percent memory / work queue / command :
ps -e -o "uid pid pcpu pmem wq comm"
-e is similar to -A (all inclusive; your processes and others), and -o is to force a format.
if you are looking for a specific uid, you can chain it using awk or grep such as :
ps -e -o "uid pid pcpu pmem wq comm" | grep 501
this should (almost) show only for userid 501. try it.
The slightly GUI way
if you are a cli (ui) fan. I recommend trying https://github.com/clementtsang/bottom which shows not only processes, but also temperature, disk usage and network. Screenshot is running from kitty (terminal) as an example, I use it on OSX default terminal and the color shows up a bit different, but still amazing.
The tree way
As described here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pstree will give a better connection on the hierarchy of the processes
brew install pstree # if you need to install it
pstree
pstree -u <user> # show only processes by your user
pstree -s <string> # show only processes with string
pstree -help # show help
Related
Is there a way to close/kill " < app> quit unexpectedly" window from terminal or bash script? What's the process name?
(AppleScript automation solutions are not acceptible.)
You can:
killall UserNotificationCenter
It will kill the UserNotificationCenter (an ALL it's opened windows too), so the message disappears. (Don't worry, the next error message will start is again automatically.)
But, (IMHO) it is better to use the osascript command in a form:
osascript -l JavaScript <<EOS
... apple-scripting using JavaScript ...
EOS
IMHO JavaScript is much easier to understand (for an common programmer) as the "standard" applescript.
You can disable it appearing in the first place by:
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none
Other possible values are developer† (show stack traces for all processes) and crashreport (the default).
This also means that no entries will be written to the Console.app though. The dialog itself is shown by the UserNotificationCenter and can be disabled (along with many other notifications) by:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.UserNotificationCenter.plist
Some context:
Mach has a concept of exception ports. Each thread/process has a task, process and a host exception port, which are checked when an exception occurs. The CrashReporter daemon registers the host exception port and gets activated when no other signal handler ran. It then creates a stack trace and memory map of the process and instructs the UserNotificationCenter to show it. By default it only does so for GUI applications.
On High Sierra, I had to use defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter -string "developer"
I am not sure if apple hast the same core utilities, but I come from the unix world too.
for example: the solution would be to find the process id via name. on my linux system I can use the following to find a process id...
ps -aux
An other variation would be top. both give a ton of information and I have to filter the code with grep.
After that I would filter the string via cut or sed.
last but not least the kill command.
the script should look some like this ...
#!/bin/sh
PNAME="< app> quit unexpectedly"
ps -aux | grep "$PNAME" | cut -d" " -f2 | kill
but be warned, this script can make huge damage if u dont know how to use it.
To be hornest I would never use some like this, instead would execute kill manually..
I'm doing my project and I need to log keystrokes system wide in macOS. So, I turned over to GitHub and found Swift-Keylogger. The only problem is I can't quit the Terminal while the program is still running.
Is there any way to not to run this in terminal or closing the terminal window instead of creating a mac app like here.
Note: There are some mac app style executables in github but they are not providing the output I want and some need additional permissions.
Instead of running the executable like ./Keylogger use nohup ./Keylogger &.
You can quit the Terminal after executing the command.
To kill the Keylogger, run ps -e | grep "Keylogger" to get pid and kill -9 pid.
P.S. I thought of adding it as well as running at startup but I'm too lazy to update the repository.
I am trying to do a profiling on my embedded Linux box. This is running a software.
I want to do a profiling on my software using strace.
The application is the main software that keeps running forever.
How can I run the strace and log the outputs to a file.
In my rcS script.
I run the application like this
./my_app
Now, with strace.
strace ./my_app -> I want to log these outputs on a file, and I should be able to access the file without killing the application. Remember this application never terminates.
Please help!
Instead of a target filename, use the -p option to strace to specify the process ID of an already running process you wish to attach to.
Chris is actually right. Strace takes the -p option, which enables you to attach to a running process just by specifying the processes PID.
Let's say your 'my_app' process runs with PID 2301 (you can see the PID by logging into your device and us 'ps'). Try doing 'strace -p 2301', and you will see all system calls for that PID. You can throw it to a file by redirecting everywhere: 'strace -p 2301 > /tmp/my_app-strace'.
Hope this helps.
I have a LaunchDaemon. When it runs, it checks if SIMBL is installed. If SIMBL is not installed, it uses NSTask to run /usr/sbin/installer on the SIMBL.pkg.
SIMBL's postflight script then tries to run a launchctl load command to start SIMBL's LaunchAgent immediately:
sudo -u "$USER" -- /bin/launchctl load -F -S Aqua -D user "${LAUNCHD_PLIST}"
This fails, because my LaunchDaemon's NSTask environment doesn't have $USER set.
If I have my daemon detect the current user with the System Configuration framework and pass it to NSTask with setEnvironment, launchctl bugs out on me:
Bug: launchctl.c:2325 (23930):13: (dbfd = open(g_job_overrides_db_path, O_RDONLY | O_EXLOCK | O_CREAT, S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR)) != -1
I realize a daemon, by definition, should not operate in a user session. By the same token, Apple seems to recommend LaunchAgents as helper objects for LaunchDaemons, to do that user session work. Is there any way to get such an agent up and running immediately?
I have all the .plists in the right places (they start running after a reboot, the next time launchctl does its regular loading) so my first thought was to just tell launchctl to reload. But all the code to do that is commented out in launchctl.c:
// { "reload", reload_cmd, "Reload configuration files and/or directories" },
...
* In later versions of launchd, I hope to load everything in the first pass,
* then do the Bonjour magic on the jobs that need it, and reload them, but for now,
* I haven't thought through the various complexities of reloading jobs, and therefore
* launchd doesn't have reload support right now.
Oh how launchd drives me crazy....
To cut to the chase, after much study and experimentation, this is how I do it on 10.5+:
# If possible, tell launchd to start the LaunchAgent. This will fail on 10.4.
# $F[0] is the pid
# $F[1] is the username
# $F[2] is the first word of the command
ps -ww -A -opid,user,command | \
perl -nae 'if($F[2] =~ /\bloginwindow\b/) { system(
qq(launchctl bsexec $F[0] su $F[1] -c "launchctl load -w <your_plist>"))
}'
I have found no way to achieve this directly on 10.4. I cheat on 10.4 and just run the thing the LaunchAgent would have run, even though it has a GUI and you're not supposed to be able to do that (you can anyway in 10.4-10.6; you can't in 10.7). On 10.4, the LaunchAgent works correct after the next reboot.
The above code looks for loginwindow processes and uses bsexec to run commands in those contexts. Keep in mind that with Fast User Switching, there can be multiple contexts.
Some useful links:
Daemons and Services Programming Guide. You have to read it, but it won't actually answer any of the hard questions. But it will at least give you hints at where everything is located.
TN2083. This is a maddening document that raises as many questions as it answers, but is gospel and mandatory reading for anyone entering the abyss of launchd.
Starting/stopping a launchd agent for all users with GUI sessions. This has several other useful links and explanation.
IMO, launchd is one of the worst "great ideas" Apple has ever deployed. The idea is very useful, but the API is horrible.
After I run a shell script (which call a bunch a other scripts depend on conditions. which is too complicated to understand), I can execute a command 'gdbclient' at my MacOS terminal.
But when I do 'which gdbclient' and 'alias gdbclient', it shows nothing.
Is there anyway for me to find out what 'gdbclient' is actually doing?
You can open up another terminal window and type: ps
That will list all the running processes.
If your script is running as a different user than the current one, you can use ps -ef to list all running processes.
If you know the PID of the process that ran your script, you can find all child processes via parent PID using ps -f | grep [pid]
You can use the Activity Monitor to check things out pretty thoroughly. To get the right privileges to see everything going on you can do:
sudo open /Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app/
Dtrace can give you some helpful information: dtrace
to find process 'gdbclient':
ps aux | grep gdbclient
That wont tell you what it's "doing" but that it's running