pstree cheatsheet

The ps command in Linux has been horribly mauled by having to support Unix, BSD and GNU options and innumerable eccentric back-compatible necessities that I find it almost unusable. Instead, I like to use the pstree command for almost all my process exploration tasks. pstree shows the processes on a system as a tree.

• Installing it is easy:

$ sudo apt install psmisc

• By default, pstree shows the processes of all users as a tree, where each link connects the parent process on the left to the child process on the right:

$ pstree

• To only view the processes of a particular user joe:

$ pstree joe

• To view the command-line arguments of each process:

$ pstree -a

• To view the PID of each process:

$ pstree -p

• To view all the children or descendants of a process with PID 900:

$ pstree 900

• To view both the ancestors and descendants of a process with PID 900:

$ pstree -s 900

Tried with: pstree 22.21 and Ubuntu 16.04