pstree(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | FILES | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PSTREE(1)                     User Commands                    PSTREE(1)

NAME         top

       pstree - display a tree of processes

SYNOPSIS         top

       pstree [-a, --arguments] [-c, --compact-not] [-C, --color attr]
       [-g, --show-pgids]
       [-h, --highlight-all, -H pid, --highlight-pid pid] [-l, --long]
       [-n, --numeric-sort] [-N, --ns-sort ns] [-p, --show-pids]
       [-s, --show-parents] [-S, --ns-changes] [-t, --thread-names]
       [-T, --hide-threads] [-u, --uid-changes] [-Z, --security-context]
       [-A, --ascii, -G, --vt100, -U, --unicode] [pid, user]
       pstree -V, --version

DESCRIPTION         top

       pstree shows running processes as a tree.  The tree is rooted at
       either pid or init if pid is omitted.  If a user name is
       specified, all process trees rooted at processes owned by that
       user are shown.

       pstree visually merges identical branches by putting them in
       square brackets and prefixing them with the repetition count,
       e.g.

           init-+-getty
                |-getty
                |-getty
                `-getty

       becomes

           init---4*[getty]

       Child threads of a process are found under the parent process and
       are shown with the process name in curly braces, e.g.

           icecast2---13*[{icecast2}]

       If pstree is called as pstree.x11 then it will prompt the user at
       the end of the line to press return and will not return until
       that has happened.  This is useful for when pstree is run in a
       xterminal.

       Certain kernel or mount parameters, such as the hidepid option
       for procfs, will hide information for some processes. In these
       situations pstree will attempt to build the tree without this
       information, showing process names as question marks.

OPTIONS         top

       -a     Show command line arguments.  If the command line of a
              process is swapped out, that process is shown in
              parentheses.  -a implicitly disables compaction for
              processes but not threads.

       -A     Use ASCII characters to draw the tree.

       -c     Disable compaction of identical subtrees.  By default,
              subtrees are compacted whenever possible.

       -C     Color the process name by given attribute. Currently
              pstree only accepts the value age which colors by process
              age.  Processes newer than 60 seconds are green, newer
              than an hour yellow and the remaining red.

       -g     Show PGIDs.  Process Group IDs are shown as decimal
              numbers in parentheses after each process name.  If both
              PIDs and PGIDs are displayed then PIDs are shown first.

       -G     Use VT100 line drawing characters.

       -h     Highlight the current process and its ancestors.  This is
              a no-op if the terminal doesn't support highlighting or if
              neither the current process nor any of its ancestors are
              in the subtree being shown.

       -H     Like -h, but highlight the specified process instead.
              Unlike with -h, pstree fails when using -H if highlighting
              is not available.

       -l     Display long lines.  By default, lines are truncated to
              either the COLUMNS environment variable or the display
              width.  If neither of these methods work, the default of
              132 columns is used.

       -n     Sort processes with the same parent by PID instead of by
              name.  (Numeric sort.)

       -N     Show individual trees for each namespace of the type
              specified.  The available types are: ipc, mnt, net, pid,
              time, user, uts.  Regular users don't have access to other
              users' processes information, so the output will be
              limited.

       -p     Show PIDs.  PIDs are shown as decimal numbers in
              parentheses after each process name.  -p implicitly
              disables compaction.

       -s     Show parent processes of the specified process.

       -S     Show namespaces transitions.  Like -N, the output is
              limited when running as a regular user.

       -t     Show full names for threads when available.

       -T     Hide threads and only show processes.

       -u     Show uid transitions.  Whenever the uid of a process
              differs from the uid of its parent, the new uid is shown
              in parentheses after the process name.

       -U     Use UTF-8 (Unicode) line drawing characters.  Under Linux
              1.1-54 and above, UTF-8 mode is entered on the console
              with echo -e ' 33%8' and left with echo -e ' 33%@'.

       -V     Display version information.

       -Z     Show the current security attributes of the process. For
              SELinux systems this will be the security context.

FILES         top

       /proc  location of the proc file system

BUGS         top

       Some character sets may be incompatible with the VT100
       characters.

SEE ALSO         top

       ps(1), top(1), proc(5).

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the psmisc (Small utilities that use the
       /proc filesystem) project.  Information about the project can be
       found at ⟨https://gitlab.com/psmisc/psmisc⟩.  If you have a bug
       report for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/psmisc/psmisc/issues⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/psmisc/psmisc.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2023-11-14.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

psmisc                         2021-06-21                      PSTREE(1)

Pages that refer to this page: ps(1)proc(5)