ps -aux

In Linux the command:

ps -aux

Means show 'all processes for all users'. You might be wondering what the x means? The x is a specifier that means 'any of the users'. So you could type this:

ps -auroot

Which displays all the root processes, or

ps -auel

which displays all the processes from user el. The technobabble in the 'man ps' page is: "ps -aux prints all processes owned by a user named 'x' as well as printing all processes that would be selected by the -a option.




$ ps aux  
USER       PID  %CPU %MEM  VSZ RSS     TTY   STAT START   TIME COMMAND
timothy  29217  0.0  0.0 11916 4560 pts/21   S+   08:15   0:00 pine  
root     29505  0.0  0.0 38196 2728 ?        Ss   Mar07   0:00 sshd: can [priv]   
can      29529  0.0  0.0 38332 1904 ?        S    Mar07   0:00 sshd: can@notty  

USER = user owning the process
PID = process ID of the process
%CPU = It is the CPU time used divided by the time the process has been running.
%MEM = ratio of the process’s resident set size to the physical memory on the machine
VSZ = virtual memory usage of entire process
RSS = resident set size, the non-swapped physical memory that a task has used
TTY = controlling tty (terminal)
STAT = multi-character process state
START = starting time or date of the process
TIME = cumulative CPU time
COMMAND = command with all its arguments

See the ps man page for more info.

More Info -> http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/kill-process-in-linux-or-terminate-a-process-in-unix-or-linux-systems/