General from the Introduction to Linux by OnWorks

4.6. Exercises‌

These are some exercises that will help you get the feel for processes running on your system.

• Run top in one terminal while you do the exercises in another.

• Run the ps command.

• Read the man pages to find out how to display all your processes.

• Run the command find /. What effect does it have on system load? Stop this command.

• In graphical mode, start the xclock program in the foreground. Then let it run in the background. Stop the program using the kill command.

• Run the xcalc directly in the background, so that the prompt of the issuing terminal is released.

• What does kill -9 -1 do?

• Open two terminals or terminal windows again and use write to send a message from one to the other.

• Issue the dmesg command. What does it tell?

• How long does it take to execute ls in the current directory?

• Based on process entries in /proc, owned by your UID, how would you work to find out which processes these actually represent?

• How long has your system been running?

• Which is your current TTY?