inanzzz | Listing and terminating running processes with ps aux on Ubuntu

You may sometimes want to see what applications are running and terminate some of them based on their process IDs in terminal. To do this ps aux is used for listing and kill -9 for termination the process.

Listing option 1

Command ps aux lets you dump all processes on screen in one go.

inanzzz@inanzzz:~$ ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.1  34052  3144 ?        Ss   10:42   0:02 /sbin/init
root         2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    10:42   0:00 [kthreadd]
root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    10:42   0:02 [ksoftirqd/0]
root         5  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   10:42   0:00 [kworker/0:0H]
.....

Listing option 2

Command ps aux | less lets you list processes one by one.

inanzzz@inanzzz:~$ ps aux | less
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.1  34052  3144 ?        Ss   10:42   0:02 /sbin/init
root         2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    10:42   0:00 [kthreadd]
root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    10:42   0:02 [ksoftirqd/0]
root         5  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   10:42   0:00 [kworker/0:0H]
.....
#cursor flashes here for you to hit enter to show next process

Listing option 3

Command ps aux | grep terminal lists only applications which are related to "terminal" keyword.

inanzzz@inanzzz:~$ ps aux | grep terminal
inanzzz   6306  0.6  0.9 648484 18800 ?        Sl   18:02   0:04 gnome-terminal
inanzzz   6400  0.0  0.0  15944   916 pts/3    S+   18:14   0:00 grep --color=auto terminal

Listing option 4

Command top lists all running applications in OS.

inanzzz@inanzzz:~$ top

Processes: 277 total, 2 running, 14 stuck, 261 sleeping, 1154 threads                                          10:05:29
Load Avg: 1.41, 1.42, 1.42  CPU usage: 8.80% user, 6.42% sys, 84.76% idle
SharedLibs: 12M resident, 12M data, 0B linkedit. MemRegions: 92798 total, 3171M resident, 68M private, 1458M shared.
PhysMem: 5926M used (1675M wired), 10G unused.
VM: 707G vsize, 1063M framework vsize, 32763508(0) swapins, 34121836(0) swapouts.
Networks: packets: 26225324/30G in, 16810622/2649M out. Disks: 4214577/203G read, 5759781/303G written.

PID    COMMAND      %CPU TIME     #TH   #WQ  #PORT MEM    PURG   CMPRS  PGRP  PPID  STATE    BOOSTS            %CPU_ME
46022  top          3.0  00:05.91 1     0    17    3044K  0B     0B     46022 46018 sleeping *0[1]             0.00000
46018  bash         0.0  00:00.02 1     0    15    652K   0B     0B     46018 46017 sleeping *0[1]             0.00000
46017  login        0.0  00:00.15 2     0    27    1068K  0B     0B     46017 20904 sleeping *0[9]             0.00000
46015  Google Chrom 0.0  00:00.81 11    1    88    30M    0B     0B     20899 20899 stuck    *0[26]            0.00000

Terminate process

Command kill -9 terminates process with given ID.

inanzzz@inanzzz:~$ ps aux | grep terminal
inanzzz   6306  0.6  0.9 648484 18800 ?        Sl   18:02   0:04 gnome-terminal
inanzzz   6400  0.0  0.0  15944   916 pts/3    S+   18:14   0:00 grep --color=auto terminal
inanzzz@inanzzz:~$ sudo kill -9 6400
[sudo] password for inanzzz: