Using the "ps" to show run-time options

Eric Dunbar eric.dunbar at gmail.com
Fri Jan 28 15:10:25 UTC 2005


(difficulty: advanced newbie; novice oldie)

I just noticed something neat about "ps" in another thread today:

<preamble>
The way I learn how to do things in Linux is (mostly) through
trial-and-error and edumacated guessing as to how to edit .conf files
and guessing as to what options to pass to executables (works often
enough for me :-). ...sometimes <sigh> I'll resort to reading man
pages, searching the web, or asking the user lists for help (I am a
Mac fan(atic) at heart after all so reading manuals isn't exactly how
I use my computers).
</preamble>

Anyway, today I noticed a really cool option for "ps". You can use the
following command (from a terminal) to display the exact syntax of the
command-line instruction that was used to start a particular process:

ps ax

I've been playing with XDCMP of late which has required me to be able
to start and stop gdm and X on my client machine (I still am killing X
the "dirty" way by doing "sudo killall gdm"... I presume there's a
proper way to do it). Anyway, I want to know what the options are for
my normal X.org session so that I can modify them when I manually
start X (yesterday I managed to have my local X session working on vt9
and the XDCMP session working on vt8 through luck (response time
wasn't great on vt9 but it worked) so now I'd like to know what the
system does :)...

e.g.

ericd at LinuxOnPismo:~ $ ps xa|grep X11
 4230 ?        S      2:41 /usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 -br -audit 0 -auth
/var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth -nolisten tcp vt7

(FYI yesterday I used the vt8 option (I had a hunch after I skimmed
the man page for X) to get "X -query 192.168.0.2 vt8" to display my
XDCMP session on vt8... then I ran gdm from a CLUI and it said :0 was
used so it was going to use :1 and somehow it ended up on vt9 ;-).

Anyhow, I hope someone else can find some use in this cool little "ps
ax" gem as well.

Eric.




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