Parallel Process Find

Since pfps is perhaps the most novel of these commands, we give details of it here.

Many of the uses of ps are similar to the uses of ls, such as determining the age of a process (resp. file) or owner of a process (resp. file). Because a file system often contains large numbers of individual files, the Unix command find provides a way to find files that satisfy some common properties. Because the number of processes is relatively small, there has been no counterpart to find for processes. However, with 30 to 60 processes on each processor, a ps of even a small parallel system can generate hundreds to thousands of lines of output. In this section, we propose a process find (and its parallel version) that provides the same style of functionality that find provides for the file system. The options for pfps are given in Figure .

Just as with find, multiple matching criteria are and'ed together. For example, to find out which processes named bigjob have been running for at least one day, use

    pfps -all -tn bigjob -stime 1:0:0 -print