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Summary

  • A process is a running instance of an executable program. Processes are assigned a state, which can be running, sleeping, stopped, or zombie. The ps command lists processes.

  • Each terminal has its own session, and can have a foreground process and independent background processes. The jobs command displays processes within a terminal session.

  • A signal is a software interrupt that reports events to an executing program. The kill, pkill, and killall commands use signals to control processes.

  • Load average is an estimate of how busy the system is. To display load average values, you can use the top, uptime, or w commands.

Revision: rh124-9.0-398f302