Process
Every program that runs in Unix is a process, and because of that has its own process id, which is a way for the system to uniquely reference it.
To view the processes running on the system we need the ps command, and we are
going to give it some switches to allow us to see all of the processes that are
running. I have shortened the output to be able to show it on this site.
dave@[daveeddy]:/var/www/dev/$ ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 23680 1744 ? Ss Sep29 0:00 /sbin/init
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [kthreadd]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [migration/0]
root 4 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [watchdog/0]
root 6 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [migration/1]
root 7 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [ksoftirqd/1]
root 8 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [watchdog/1]
root 9 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [migration/2]
root 10 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [ksoftirqd/2]
root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [watchdog/2]
root 12 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [migration/3]
root 13 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [ksoftirqd/3]
root 14 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Sep29 0:00 [watchdog/3]
The owner of the process is on the far left, the id is next to it, and the process itself is on the right side.
The owner of all processes is init, and it has a process id (pid) of 1, which it will always have, and we will talk about it in a later section.
