DOKK / manpages / debian 11 / px / px.1.en
PX(1) General Commands Manual PX(1)

px — list running processes and show process metadata

px [--debug] px [--debug] filter px [--debug] PID

The px utility lists processes running on the system, to the standard output. If stdout is a terminal, output will be truncated at terminal window width.

Without any arguments, px lists all processes on the system.

If you specify a filter the output will contain only processes matching that filter.

The filter can be a user name or part of a command line. For example, ‘px java’ will list all Java processes, and ‘px root’ will list all of root's processes.

Running px PID will show you information about a given process:

  • The process tree; parents and children
  • Start time, run time and CPU usage
  • List of other processes started around the same time as this one
  • List of users logged in when the process was started
  • Where stdin, stdout and stderr is pointing
  • Network connections
  • IPC connections (sockets, pipes and local network connections) and which processes are at the other end of those

px tries to be helpful about naming processes, and avoid printing names of various VMs.

For example, if you do ‘java -jar foo.jar’, px will show this process as ‘foo.jar’ rather than ‘java’.

px parses command lines from:

  • Java
  • Python
  • Node
  • Ruby
  • Various shells
  • Perl

ptop(1)

px lives at http://github.com/walles/px

August 24, 2018 Debian