Solaris Process controlling – proc tools

Lingesh

11 years ago

In the last post, we have seen about process status using prstat.But here we are going to see how to control the process using pid in Solaris Many of the Solaris administrator may thinking how to freeze the process ? Some beginners may still have doubt that how to kill the process? Some of them may still wondering how start the stopped process.
Here we have the answer for all the above questions.

Process controlling tools

We can control the process using the below commands.

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Listing and controlling process
PTOOLS	DESCRIPTION
ptree	To print a process origin tree of the system
pkill	To kill the process using pid or using pgrep
pgrep	To match a process name from process list
prun	To continue a process specific process
pstop	To freeze a process specific process
pwait	To wait for a process to finish
preap	To reap zombies i.e to clear the zombie process

Here i will just show you the putty terminal output of each commands.
ptree:
Using ptree command you can see where that process has been started and you can see its origin.

# ptree 3222
2141  /sbin/sh - /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxcached root
  3222  /sbin/sh - /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxcached root
    3223  vxnotify -C -w 15
#

pkill:
Using pkill command you can kill the process using process id (pid). This is just alternative of “kill -9 pid”

# ps -ef |grep find
    root 10881  4080   7 22:52:05 pts/3       0:04 find / -name test
    root 10886  4080   0 22:52:22 pts/3       0:00 grep find
# kill -9 10881

pgrep:
using pgrep command,you can filter the process using certain criteria.

# pgrep sshd
1814
15250
4068
4069
Verifying our work using below command
# ps -ef |egrep "1814|15250|4068|4069"
    root  1814     1   0   May 06 ?           0:01 /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
    root  4076  4069   0 18:18:19 pts/3       0:00 -sh
    root 15250     1   0 02:08:11 ?           0:00 /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
    root  4068  1814   0 18:18:13 ?           0:00 /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
    root  4069  4068   0 18:18:13 ?           0:03 /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
#

pstop:
You can suspend the process temporarily using pstop command.This will just freeze the process unless untill you start it again.

# ps -ef |grep find
    root 11162  4080   4 23:02:18 pts/3       0:02 find / -name test
    root 11164  4080   0 23:02:31 pts/3       0:00 grep find
# pstop 11162
# prstat
 PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS   STATE  PRI  NICE   TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
 11162 root     1656K 1048K stop    60    0   0:00:47  27% find/1

prun:
The prun command used to start the process which was stopped by pstop command.

# prun 11162
# prstat
   PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
 11162 root     1656K 1048K cpu0    53    0   0:00:22  20% find/1

pwait:
The pwait command just blocks and waits for termination of a process in Solaris.

# pwait 11162

preap:
Using preap,you can just get rid of zombie process aka defunct process
Please see the link to know more about preap.

Hope you have learned more about Solaris process controlling.

Thank you for reading the article. Please leave a comment if you have any doubt.