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Accessing Other Processes

In addition to accessing and manipulating processes that are subprocesses of the current Emacs session, Emacs Lisp programs can also access other processes running on the same machine. We call these system processes, to distinguish them from Emacs subprocesses.

Emacs provides several primitives for accessing system processes. Not all platforms support these primitives; on those which don’t, these primitives return nil.

Function: list-system-processes

This function returns a list of all the processes running on the system. Each process is identified by its PID, a numerical process ID that is assigned by the OS and distinguishes the process from all the other processes running on the same machine at the same time.

Function: process-attributes pid

This function returns an alist of attributes for the process specified by its process ID pid. Each association in the alist is of the form (key . value), where key designates the attribute and value is the value of that attribute. The various attribute keys that this function can return are listed below. Not all platforms support all of these attributes; if an attribute is not supported, its association will not appear in the returned alist.

euid

The effective user ID of the user who invoked the process. The corresponding value is a number. If the process was invoked by the same user who runs the current Emacs session, the value is identical to what user-uid returns (see User Identification).

user

User name corresponding to the process’s effective user ID, a string.

egid

The group ID of the effective user ID, a number.

group

Group name corresponding to the effective user’s group ID, a string.

comm

The name of the command that runs in the process. This is a string that usually specifies the name of the executable file of the process, without the leading directories. However, some special system processes can report strings that do not correspond to an executable file of a program.

state

The state code of the process. This is a short string that encodes the scheduling state of the process. Here’s a list of the most frequently seen codes:

"D"

uninterruptible sleep (usually I/O)

"R"

running

"S"

interruptible sleep (waiting for some event)

"T"

stopped, e.g., by a job control signal

"Z"

zombie: a process that terminated, but was not reaped by its parent

For the full list of the possible states, see the manual page of the ps command.

ppid

The process ID of the parent process, a number.

pgrp

The process group ID of the process, a number.

sess

The session ID of the process. This is a number that is the process ID of the process’s session leader.

ttname

A string that is the name of the process’s controlling terminal. On Unix and GNU systems, this is normally the file name of the corresponding terminal device, such as /dev/pts65.

tpgid

The numerical process group ID of the foreground process group that uses the process’s terminal.

minflt

The number of minor page faults caused by the process since its beginning. (Minor page faults are those that don’t involve reading from disk.)

majflt

The number of major page faults caused by the process since its beginning. (Major page faults require a disk to be read, and are thus more expensive than minor page faults.)

cminflt

cmajflt

Like minflt and majflt, but include the number of page faults for all the child processes of the given process.

utime

Time spent by the process in the user context, for running the application’s code. The corresponding value is a Lisp timestamp (see Time of Day).

stime

Time spent by the process in the system (kernel) context, for processing system calls. The corresponding value is a Lisp timestamp.

time

The sum of utime and stime. The corresponding value is a Lisp timestamp.

cutime

cstime

ctime

Like utime, stime, and time, but include the times of all the child processes of the given process.

pri

The numerical priority of the process.

nice

The nice value of the process, a number. (Processes with smaller nice values get scheduled more favorably.)

thcount

The number of threads in the process.

start

The time when the process was started, as a Lisp timestamp.

etime

The time elapsed since the process started, as a Lisp timestamp.

vsize

The virtual memory size of the process, measured in kilobytes.

rss

The size of the process’s resident set, the number of kilobytes occupied by the process in the machine’s physical memory.

pcpu

The percentage of the CPU time used by the process since it started. The corresponding value is a floating-point number between 0 and 100.

pmem

The percentage of the total physical memory installed on the machine used by the process’s resident set. The value is a floating-point number between 0 and 100.

args

The command-line with which the process was invoked. This is a string in which individual command-line arguments are separated by blanks; whitespace characters that are embedded in the arguments are quoted as appropriate for the system’s shell: escaped by backslash characters on GNU and Unix, and enclosed in double quote characters on Windows. Thus, this command-line string can be directly used in primitives such as shell-command.