Here are a few UNIX commands that I have recently encountered that help with process management and are particularly useful when jobs are running in the background. Here they are:

nohup

It’s short for no hangup and stops termination a job when a user logs off. Another result is that all console messages being directed to a file called nohup.out in the directory current to the job being run, or in the user’s home directory where write access to the current working directory is unavailable.

ps

This returns a list of processes, their ID’s and their statuses. By default this is for your own processes but you can look beyond this with the myriad of options that can be passed. For instance, the-U switch allows you to look at job for other users while the -f one shows more information than the standard call and this even includes the commands submitted to start the ongoing processes.

kill

The name says it all and it’s far quicker than the rigmarole that you have to endure with the Windows task manager; I wonder if there is a command line approach to process termination on Windows.