Skip to main content

OS X Process-Fu 101

OS X is of course a variety of BSD Unix, not Linux. Often is the case where Linux commands either don't work, or don't give the same results on OS X as they do on Linux. For example, a basic 
netstat
will give you a long list of the processes making network connections on your box. On Linux, various command line options can help you drill down from there, to get the answers to more specific queries. On OS X, those same queries don't give you the answers you're seeking. This isn't a compare and contrast article between Linux and OSX. Instead, I'm just noting various commands that can give answers to some basic questions. On OS X, for example, to get an answer to the question: "What process is running on port 50224?" we would use: 
sudo lsof -Pn | grep 50224
This will give you a list of everything connected to port 50224, sans any kind of headings. A much more abbreviated command that will give you essentially the same things, but with column headings as well, is: 
sudo lsof -i :50224
Now, suppose we wanted to get a listing of all processes making network connections from our (OS X) box, including their Command Name, PID, Type of connection, and the Port they're listing to (along with other info)? 
lsof -i -P | less
This command gives all this, with a heading at the top. Piping to less is optional.
Another thing that often comes up is finding out if a certain process is running, let's call it foo: 
ps aux | grep foo
This will show whether or not foo is indeed running, and if it is, what its PID is. From there, if *foo* is unwanted, it can be killed with: 
kill -9 foo
Just as a note: in some cases, you may need to: 
sudo
the above commands.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kicking things off

My purpose here is to document various thoughts and findings as things come up, or come to mind.  All strictly technical, and kind of a development diary of sorts.  While ideally, others may find these things useful, my main intent is to have them here for my reference ;-) Still, I'll try to write them in tutorial fashion
Post a Comment
Read more

Passing Functions and Lambdas into Functions with Ruby

Ruby's New Style of Lambda Functions f = ->( m ) { p m } f.call( 1 ) #=> 1 Which of course means the same thing as: f = lambda { |n| p n } f.call(1) #=> 1 Ruby Proc Objects p = Proc.new { |n| p n + 2 } p.call(2) #=> 4 Using a Function as a Closure in Ruby def domo( k ) ->(m) { p m + k } end z = domo( 5 ) z.call( 5 ) #=> 10 Function :domo takes a single parameter. Within :domo , we create a lambda that takes a single parameter, and adds that parameter to the value :domo takes in as its parameter. Then, we assign z to be the result of the lambda in :domo with its 'k' parameter loaded with 5. When z is called, we pass (another) 5 to it. This parameter loads the lambdas n parameter. The lambda executes, essentially adding n (5) + k (5) and yielding the result of 10. The thing about closures such as this is, we can load the initial value of the lambda to be whatever we want it to be when assigning the function :domo '...
Post a Comment
Read more

Add pre-compiled Elixir on OS X

So, I've been a big Erlang fan for a few years now, and then found out about Elixir :  what I would describe as kind of a Ruby -ish creamy frosting on top of Erlang . But I'll address more on both in future. Right now, I thought I'd just give a quick and dirty way to add Elixir , if you've already got Erlang installed (hint: check-out this Erlang Solutions link for a pre-compiled Erlang solution).  You can also use brew to install both , but I have found that with the simplicity of brew, you give up having the most current version of software.  In both cases. The pre-compiled zip for the most current version of  Elixir can be found here .  Unzipping reveals a folder containing everything you need.  For simplicity's sake, keeping everything pertaining to Elixir all within this folder makes the most sense.  By doing so, all that's needed is to position the folder, and then make links to all the executables in a directory already in our path.  Through t...
Post a Comment
Read more