Psmisc-21.4

The Psmisc package contains programs for displaying information on processes.

Approximate build time:  0.1 SBU
Required disk space:     2.2 MB

Psmisc installation depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Diffutils, GCC, Gettext, Glibc, Grep, Make, Ncurses, Sed.

Installation of Psmisc

Prepare Psmisc for compilation:

./configure --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/

The meaning of the configure option:

  • --exec-prefix=/: This causes the binaries to be installed in /bin instead of /usr/bin. As the Psmisc programs are often used in bootscripts, they should be available also when the /usr file system isn't mounted.

Compile the package:

make

Now install it:

make install

There is no reason for the pstree and pstree.x11 programs to reside in /bin. We therefore move them to /usr/bin. Also, there is no need for pstree.x11 to exist as a separate program. We therefore make it a symbolic link to pstree:

mv /bin/pstree* /usr/bin
ln -sf pstree /usr/bin/pstree.x11

By default Psmisc's pidof program isn't installed. Generally, this isn't a problem because we later install the Sysvinit package, which provides a better pidof program. But if you're not going to use Sysvinit, you should complete the installation of Psmisc by creating the following symlink:

ln -s killall /bin/pidof

Contents of Psmisc

Installed programs: fuser, killall, pstree and pstree.x11 (link to pstree)

Short descriptions

fuser reports the PIDs of processes that use the given files or file systems.

killall kills processes by name. It sends a signal to all processes running any of the given commands.

pstree displays running processes as a tree.

pstree.x11 same as pstree except that it waits for confirmation before exiting.