QPS(1)

💅 qps — Visual Process Manager ✨

okay bestie, so this is qps, from the General Commands Manual (section 1, if the number didn't tip you off 🎀). It's your little GUI bestie for watching processes. Let's get into it.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

qps — the Visual Process Manager. she's visual, she's a manager, she's iconic 👑

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

qps [ options ]

that's it. that's the whole thing. just qps and whatever options you wanna throw at her 💖

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so qps is a monitor that shows you the status of all the processes currently existing, kinda like top(1) or ps(1) — except the user interface is built on the Qt toolkit, and ngl most operations are pretty intuitive. you'll figure it out, i believe in you 🫶

The process list is sorted by the highlighted field. Click on another title to change the sort; click that same one again to reverse the sorting order. Wanna rearrange the columns? Just drag the titles around. main character energy fr.

Left-clicking a process selects or deselects it. Shift-click to select multiple processes at once (multiselect slay). And the PIDs of your selected processes can be pasted into other applications — though heads up, this option can be disabled.

Right mouse button pops up a context menu. It duplicates some functions from the main menu for convenience, and it works both on processes and on the column headings. versatile queen.

Control-clicking in the process table selects all processes with the same displayed value in that particular column. Like, say you wanna select every process owned by "joshua" — keep Control pressed while you click on "joshua" and boom. ✨ And Shift + Control together produces the expected result, as one would hope.

In Tree mode, the parent-child relations between processes are shown in a much more obvious way. Click on the triangles to show or hide an entire subtree. One thing though: sorting only affects siblings — the tree structure imposes the global order. iykyk.

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Wanna change the time-sharing priority of the selected processes? Type the new priority into the Renice... dialog. The new nice value should be in the range -20 to 20, and 0 is the default. A larger number means the process gets less CPU time. And only the super-user may decrease the nice value — so don't try it unless you're that girl 💅

The Change Scheduling... dialog lets the super-user change the scheduling policy of the selected processes (using Posix.1b scheduling control). Normal processes are set to SCHED_OTHER and have static priority 0. (Soft) real-time processes have the policy SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR and a static priority in the range of 1 to 99. (See sched_setscheduler(2).) Solaris has additional scheduling policies, but right now qps doesn't allow setting these. 🙈

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By default, the process display updates every 5 seconds. To change it, type the new update period into the Update Period... dialog. You can use the units min, s, and ms — and if you give none, seconds are assumed. You can also force an update by pressing the space bar or clicking the Update button.

⚠️ qps will consume a lot of CPU time if the update period is short or zero. bestie please. But if iconified, qps uses very little CPU — iconify is self-care 🧚

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The USER field shows the real user ID. If the effective user ID of a process differs from its real user ID, a plus sign (+) gets appended to the user name. And if it's the super-user, an asterisk (*) gets appended. cute little annotations 💖

The load, CPU, memory, and swap displays in the status bar can be toggled between graphic and text representations by clicking on them, or via settings in the Preferences... dialog. The load numbers shown are the number of jobs in the run queue averaged over 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

The swap bar turns red if free swap space falls below a certain value, which you can change in the Preferences... dialog. You can enter the number in K, M (megabytes), or % (percent of total swap space). The default is 10%. 🔥

On SMP (multi-CPU) machines running Solaris 2.6 or Linux 2.1.x or later, the CPU stats are shown for each processor in vertical mode, and the average of all CPUs in horizontal mode. okay multitasker 💅

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For displaying the WCHAN field as symbols, you need the kernel symbol file System.map. qps will search for it in these locations:

/boot/System.map-RELEASE
/boot/System.map
/lib/modules/RELEASE/System.map
/usr/src/linux-RELEASE/System.map
/usr/src/linux/System.map
/usr/local/src/linux-RELEASE/System.map
/usr/local/src/linux/System.map

where RELEASE is the kernel release number, for instance "2.0.29". If the System.map file isn't found or is unreadable, hexadecimal addresses get displayed instead. The prefixes "sys_" and "do_" are stripped from the symbols before they're displayed. And under Solaris, symbolic names are currently not supported — hexadecimal addresses will always be shown. 😭

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The View Details menu item opens a window showing different aspects of the selected processes. Double-clicking on a process does the same thing. Just so you know: all the information is only available to the owner of the process (and to the super-user). 🔒

The Sockets table (Linux only) shows the currently used TCP and UDP sockets. If Host Name Lookup is checked in the Preferences dialog, a host name lookup is done for each IP address. This is handled by a background process, but it can take a while for difficult cases — though once looked up, addresses are cached. ✨

The Memory Maps table shows the process's memory mappings. In Linux 2.0.x and Solaris, the file names are not given. Anonymous mappings (allocated memory not bound to a file or device) are marked (anonymous).

The Files table shows the process's open files. In Linux 2.0.x, the files are given on the form [AABB]:inode, where AA and BB are the device major/minor numbers in hexadecimal.

The Environment table shows the process's environment variables. Note that this is the environment with which the process was started — not necessarily incorporating later changes. Some processes that modify their command line — notably sendmail(8) and ftpd(8) — may use the environment space for this, showing nonsense in this table. 💀 Clicking on the field headings changes sorting order as usual. (On Solaris, only the first 8K of the environment are shown. It will be fixed if it turns out to be a limitation.)

Find Parent and Find Children will select the parent/children of the selected processes, and center the table on the first of them. Find Descendants will select the tree of all children of the selected processes. family tree but make it unix 🌈

If Include Child Times is selected in the Options menu, the TIME field will show the sum of the CPU times used by the process and all of its children.

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You can specify commands to be run on the selected processes by bringing up the Edit Commands... dialog. The "Description" of each command is what appears in the menu; the "Command Line" is a shell command (executed with /bin/sh). Before the command is passed to the shell, the following substitutions are made:

• %p — with the PID (Process ID) of the selected process
• %c — with the short command name of the process
• %C — with the complete command line of the process
• %u — with the name of the (real) owner of the process
• %% — with a literal '%'

Any other % + letter combination is removed. The command line will be run once for each selected process (in unspecified order). 🎀

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⌨️ KEYBOARD ACCELERATORS ⌨️

(valid in most contexts, bestie)

• Meta-W — Close the active window (except the main window)
• Q, Meta-Q — Quit qps.
• Space — Force an update of the displayed tables.
• Control-Z — Iconify qps.

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -display display — sets the X display (default is $DISPLAY)
• -geometry geometry — sets the geometry of the main window of qps
• -background color — sets the default background color and an application palette (light and dark shades are calculated). This doesn't work very well at the moment. 🙈
• -foreground color — sets the default foreground color. This has limited use as well.
• -title title — sets the application title (caption).
• -style style — sets the application GUI style. Possible styles are motif and windows. (If you are using Qt 2.x, the styles cde and platinum are also available.)
• -font font — sets the application font
• -iconic — starts the application iconified.
• -version — prints the version of qps and the Qt library, and exits.
• -help — prints a summary of command-line options and exits.

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

QPS_COLORS contains color specifications of comma-separated name:value pairs, where name is one of the following:

cpu-user, cpu-nice (Linux), cpu-sys, cpu-wait (Solaris), cpu-idle, mem-used, mem-buff, mem-cache, mem-free, swap-used, swap-free, swap-warn, load-bg, load-fg, load-lines, selection-bg, selection-fg

and value is an X11 color name — either a symbolic name like "salmon" or an RGB color like #c5b769. 🎨

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🍓 FILES 🍓

• /proc — kernel information pseudo-filesystem
• $HOME/.qps-settings — saved settings between invocations
• /etc/services — port number to service name mapping (Linux)
• System.map — kernel symbol map for WCHAN (Linux)

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

ps(1), top(1), kill(1), free(1), renice(8), proc(5), sched_setscheduler(2)

go read those too, they're the extended universe 🫶

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Mattias Engdegård (f91-men@nada.kth.se) — thank you for your service, king 🎀

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⭐ LICENSE ⭐

qps is free software and may be redistributed under certain conditions. See the GNU General Public License for details.

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💀 BUGS 💀

• qps is too big and too slow. 😭
• The %CPU number isn't accurate at very short update intervals due to timer granularity.
• The %WCPU field isn't recalculated when qps is iconified, so it might take a while to readjust when the window is deiconified again.
• The WCHAN field doesn't show a function name if a process sleeps in a location outside those in System.map (for instance, in a kernel module) — you get a hex address instead. The function name can then be found in /proc/ksyms but has to be found by hand right now. 🙈
• The CPU indicator in the status bar will display nonsense in SMP systems running Linux 2.0.x due to a kernel bug.
• Adding/removing CPUs at runtime will probably confuse qps. relatable honestly.

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this one came from the 4th Berkeley Distribution, dated Sept 30 1999 — yes she's vintage, yes she still ate 💅✨ go monitor some processes, you've got this 🫶