Process Management in Operating System - An Overview

Process is one short task fulfill by either system or users. Process is just like memory loaded and unloaded into the system. The main purpose of task is to process or run successfully or not. Every process has its own process id (identification number). 

Every process is assigned ID number to process any type of task in the operating system. Operating system can manage the process management but it requires some information. These information are accordance to requirement by the OS. 

How many processes are familiar in linux or windows operating system?

There are two types of processes are exists:

1. Interactive Processes 
2. Un-interactive Processes 

1. Interactive Processes: Process are those that input by the user and interact with the user. For example, vi or vim are text editor when we open or call these programs call interactive processes. We call them and process it successfully. 

2. Un-interactive Process: These are processes which is not interact by user. It is basically interact by the system or operating system itself.   

In other words, we can also related them by calling foreground and background processes in the operating system. 

What is daemon processes? 

Daemon used to wrap two or more process that are running the background. It runs in the background and does not interact with the user. 

How to view the current running processes?

You can easily apply the ps command in "terminal". It will show all the information as follows:

Note: Simple "ps" command shows the current processes running with limited information. In the case of ps -al, it represents details information as showed in figure. 

You can apply this command as well: 

It represents the executable processes in the operating system. 

Can we kill the processes especially in linux? 

Yes, Kill command is used to terminate the processes by mentioning process id information. It could be easily terminate by user level. (if you are admin) 

 

Pstree Command: This command shows the all current processes in the system but in tree format. Where we can see the exact see the parent process with respective their child processes easily. 

You can see it below figure how pstree works in linux: 

Top Command: The top command is just like windows "task manager" where we can see the current allocating processes in the system. We can also see the current allocation processes with the help of top command. 

How to see current processes using top command? 

Syntax: #top

Press enter to proceed. 

What kind of information we can see using top command? 

The below mentioned screen shot the information displayed using top command: 

The above figure shows the information using top command where we mainly see the pid, cpu and memory allocation information because that is important. We get aware of which processes are allocating more CPU and memory usage in the system. 

In nutshell, getting aware about the process management is important for user. According to it, we should aware about which processes consume more cpu and memory in the system. But processes view and managing in linux is quite difficult. You need more skills to learn it. But in this blog, we mainly discuss about the processes and how we can see and manage the processes in linux operating system easily. There are also lots of other commands are exists but we discusses the basic one that could be easy for you. For more information you can send us query.