Want to view running processes on Linux? Do you want to filter the list of processes that are displayed to list only those that interest you? Good news it’s quite simple.
List active processes on Linux
To list active processes on Linux, you have a system command for it, it’s ‘ps’. You can check the man page for the different options.
With the default option, you won’t get much. To have all the active processes, of the different users and outside the terminal, you will need to run the command:
ps aux
You will see that you are likely to have a lot of results. The ideal is now to be able to apply a filter to display only the processes that interest us.
Filter running processes on Linux
We have just seen that with “ps aux”, the list of active processes displayed is long. To be able to display only those that interest us, we will use the Linux “grep” command to filter the output of the ps command and display only the processes that we are looking for. For example, I want to display on my web server only running Apache processes.
The command to run will be:
ps aux | grep apache
Your list of processes will then be filtered directly on display:
It can also be useful to show only running crons, or other processes that you might be interested in.
