PSRECORD(1)

💖 PSRECORD(1) 💖

okay bestie, buckle up, because psrecord is literally the softest little spy you'll ever meet 💅 she lives in the User Commands section of the manual, and she's here to watch a process's CPU and memory and tell you everything she saw. The whole thing is in the name: psrecord — a small utility that records the CPU and memory activity of a process, and she can also output results to a plot. ✨

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🎀 NAME 🎀

psrecord — a small utility that records the CPU and memory activity of a process. Can also output results to a plot. no cap, that's the whole personality 🌸

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the vibe. The usage is literally this, exactly this, copy it into your terminal and she'll tell you what she wants:

usage: psrecord [-h] [--log LOG] [--log-format LOG_FORMAT] [--plot PLOT]
              [--duration DURATION] [--interval INTERVAL] [--include-children]
              [--include-io] process_id_or_command

Record CPU and memory usage for a process 👑 that's the mission statement, she said it herself.

🍓 positional arguments:

• process_id_or_command — the process id or command. give her a PID or give her a command, either one, she's flexible like that 💖

✨ options:

• -h, --help — show this help message and exit. classic. iconic. every tool has one and she's no exception 🫶
• --log LOG — output the statistics to a file. and listen: if neither --log nor --plot are specified, it prints to print to standard output. yeah, she said "print to print to" twice, she's got that quirky main character energy, we love her anyway 😭
• --log-format LOG_FORMAT — the format of the log file, can be one of "plain" or "csv". only those two, bestie, don't get creative 💀
• --plot PLOT — output the statistics to a plot. pretty little line graph moment 📈✨
• --duration DURATION — how long to record for (in seconds). If not specified, the recording is continuous until the job exits. so like, if you don't give her a timer she will literally follow that process to the ends of the earth 🌈
• --interval INTERVAL — how long to wait between each sample (in seconds). By default the process is sampled as often as possible. ⚠️ note that very short intervals might interfere with accuracy because of psrecord overhead itself — she's thorough but she's not free, and watching too hard changes what you're watching, iykyk
• --include-children — include sub-processes in statistics (results in a slower maximum sampling rate). family plan activated 👑 but yeah, more little guys to watch = slower top speed, that's the trade
• --include-io — include include_io I/O stats. yes she wrote it like that, she's a whole mood 🙈

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real talk though: the flags --log, --log-format, --plot, --duration, --interval, --include-children and --include-io are all optional. The only thing you actually have to give her is a process_id_or_command. periodt. 💅

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and that's the whole page bestie, every flag, every default, every warning, nothing skipped, nothing invented, we ate and left no crumbs 🧚💜

this has been the page for psrecord 1.4-3, dated November 2025 — yeah she's fresh, she's current, she's slaying in the User Commands section. bye bestie, go record something 🔥💖🎀