Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Article submitted by Adrian von Bidder. And guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!

The psmisc package is probably installed on almost all Debian and Ubuntu installations and contains a number of small tools related to process management on Unix systems. Namely, these are pstree, killall, fuser and peekfd. Below follows a short description of these useful tools. While everybody certainly knows killall and probably pstree, the package also contains fuser and peekfd, which were new to me until very recently (though I hear at least fuser is an age-old tool. Shame on me.)

killall is exactly as evil as it sounds: it kills all processes with a given name. SIGTERM is used by default, but it can of course use any other signal. It also has options to match processes by user, by a specified regex or by process group. I usually use it to shoot parts of KDE with invocations like:

$ killall kio_imap4

Since kmail seems to have something of a troubled relationship with my IMAP server. (As an aside, I’d also like to point out the program slay, packaged in the slay package, which simply kills all processes belonging to a specified user.)

A nice overview on what is running on a system is the output of pstree. Part of the output on my system is:

$ pstree
init─┬─NetworkManager───2*[{NetworkManager}]
     ├─NetworkManagerD
     ├─acpid
     ├─hald───hald-runner─┬─hald-addon-acpi
     │                    ├─hald-addon-cpuf
     │                    ├─hald-addon-dell
     │                    ├─hald-addon-inpu
     │                    └─hald-addon-stor
     ├─kdeinit─┬─artsd
     │         ├─2*[kio_file]
     │         ├─kio_http
     │         ├─3*[kio_imap4]
     │         ├─kioexec───wfica.sh───wfica
     │         ├─klauncher
     │         ├─konqueror
     │         ├─konsole───bash─┬─pstree
     │         │                └─xchat───{xchat}
     │         └─kwin
     ├─kdesktop───lineakd───2*[{lineakd}]
     ├─kdm─┬─Xorg
     │     └─kdm───startkde───kwrapper
     └─sshd

Options to pstree include display of PIDs, users and SE-Linux contexts.

fuser lets you find out what processes use a certain file, for example:

$ fuser -v /home/avbidder/.xsession-errors
                    USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/home/avbidder/.xsession-errors:
                    avbidder   4409 F.... startkde
                    avbidder   4533 F.... kdeinit
                    avbidder   4536 F.... dcopserver
                    avbidder   4538 F.... klauncher
                    avbidder   4540 F.... kded
                    avbidder   4547 F.... kwrapper
                    avbidder   4549 F.... ksmserver
                    avbidder   4550 F.... kwin
                    avbidder   4552 F.... kdesktop
                    avbidder   4554 F.... kicker
                    avbidder   4562 F.... artsd
                    avbidder   4567 F.... kmix
                    avbidder   4568 F.... konsole
                    avbidder   4572 F.... beagled
                    avbidder   4574 F.... lineakd
                    avbidder   4579 F.... knetworkmanager
                    avbidder   4680 F.... knotify
                    avbidder   4916 F.... kio_uiserver
                    avbidder   5706 F.... akregator
                    avbidder   5708 F.... kttsd
                    avbidder   5742 F.... kio_file
                    avbidder   5864 F.... beagled-helper
                    avbidder   6939 F.... konqueror
                    avbidder   7076 F.... konqueror
                    avbidder   7185 F.... kmail
                    avbidder   7696 F.... kio_imap4

fuser also has options to send signals to these programs, so you can easily KILL all these programs with fuser -k /home/avbidder/.xsession-errors (this uses SIGKILL by default, but of course you can change this.)

While fuser is a regular system administrator’s tool, peekfd is a real deep-diver: it lets you watch what goes on on a filedescriptor of a process. (Please note that peekfd is not available in etch, you need psmisc from Lenny or newer.)

If you type peekfd <pid> at a terminal, it will follow all file descriptors of the process, to get an output like this:

$ peekfd 7808

writing fd 1:
foo bar

Where 7808 is just cat >/dev/null in another terminal window, with me typing “foo bar” in it. The manual page warns about it killing the monitored process (which I haven’t seen so far) and I’ve had peekfd segfault on me a few times, so I guess there’s some real ugly magic going on behind the scenes.

Instead of following all input and output of a process, by specifying the file descriptor number, you can follow only a selection of the files a process has opened. The directory /proc/<pid>/fd is a good way to find out which file descriptors might be worth looking at.

So let this article be a motivation to have a closer look at all the packages that you’ve installed on your system since at least potato and haven’t really looked at lately…