Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:29051 comp.unix.admin:1104 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sdd.hp.com!caen!ox.com!ox.com!emv From: emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: Idle and Looping Process Killers? Message-ID: Date: 28 Feb 91 00:36:37 GMT References: <1991Feb27.041048.24190@eplrx7.uucp> Sender: usenet@ox.com (Usenet News Administrator) Followup-To: comp.unix.admin Organization: OTA Limited Partnership, Ann Arbor MI. Lines: 38 In-Reply-To: mroz@eplrx7.uucp's message of 27 Feb 91 04:10:48 GMT (note followups redirected to comp.unix.admin) In article <1991Feb27.041048.24190@eplrx7.uucp> mroz@eplrx7.uucp (Peter Mroz) writes: I'm looking for a program (exe or shell script) that will kill idle processes on Unix. By "idle processes" do you mean terminals which are sitting idle with someone logged on but no one around for hours? Processes which are sleeping for long periods of time don't absorb that much system resources. One program to log out idle users is "untamo", a version of which can be ftp'd from mthvax.cs.miami.edu:/pub/untamo.shar.Z. If I remember right the folks at Purdue who wrote this have absolved themselves of any blame for deficiencies in that version and are gradually working on a replacement. I also need a program that detects runaway processes. I find the "top" program quite useful for eyeballing what might be wrong. You don't say which version of unix you are running; top has been ported to a variety of BSD-ish systems, but as far as I can tell there's no one unified port that works on all of them. top shows the processes which are taking up the most cpu time at the moment, with a display that updates at regular intervals. Much handier than "ps" for the task. Deciding at which point a process is a runaway is not trivial. Once you have identified possible candidates, you can snoop on them further with tools like "pmon" which let you peer into detailed per-process statistics. pmon and top for Ultrix are in gatekeeper.dec.com:/pub/DEC/. -- Msen Edward Vielmetti /|--- moderator, comp.archives emv@msen.com