UNIX processes

[Oren Tirosh]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 12:33:05PM +0200, Bo M. Maryniuck wrote:
> Hi, all.
> Somebody know how to list all the processes in RIGHT way on Linux/UNIX?
> I need to find the zombies, stopped processes etc.

Ah, it's tricky. The output of the ps command is not consistent and the 
native API can be anything from variations on a /proc filesystems to 
actually looking at the kernel data structures. It's a lot of work to
support all these different interfaces.

Fortunately, someone already did the hard work - the lsof utility:

http://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/sysutils/lsof/  (Thanks!)

It lists all open files on the system and as a side-effect also reports
a great deal of information about processes. It also has an output mode 
designed for parsing by other programs. It works for a large number of 
different platforms and is installed by default on many systems.

Opening lsof with popen and decoding the output should be trivial.

	Oren