Basic ps Tips

One look at the man page for ps(1)
<https://manpages.debian.org/1/ps.1.en.html> and you see all the
different traditional option syntaxes it tries to be compatible with.
The BSD style doesn’t even prefix options with dashes, which can lead
to ambiguities and is best avoided. If this is what you’re used to,
try to wean yourself off it.

To list some useful info about all processes, you can do

    ps -ef

or, for even more info, try

    ps -eF

One thing I find annoying about this it reports less precision in
process start times for long-running processes. To get around this, you
can use a custom format. For example

    ps -eo pid,ppid,lstart,tty,etime,cmd

shows some similar info to the default “-f” format, but always includes
start time and elapsed time to the nearest second, regardless of how
long the process has been running.

Another useful command to use with ps is pgrep(1)
<https://manpages.debian.org/1/pgrep.1.en.html>, which lets you filter
processes to get information for according to various criteria. Or you
could just use grep(1) on the output from ps, as I suspect a lot of
people do. ;)