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10 – Processes
Modern operating systems are usually multitasking, meaning that they create the illusion of doing more than one thing at once by rapidly switching from one executing program to another. The Linux kernel manages this through the use of processes. Processes are how Linux organizes the different programs waiting for their turn at the CPU.
Sometimes a computer will become sluggish or an application will stop responding. In this chapter, we will look at some of the tools available at the command line that let us examine what programs are doing, and how to terminate processes that are misbehaving.
This chapter will introduce the following commands:
● ps – Report a snapshot of current processes
● top – Display tasks
● jobs – List active jobs
● bg – Place a job in the background
● fg – Place a job in the foreground
● kill – Send a signal to a process
● killall – Kill processes by name
● shutdown – Shutdown or reboot the system