phoxis Computer Science, Linux Programming

Generate the process tree of a Linux system

This is a quick post on how to generate a process tree Linux (and *nix) operating systems.

The idea is the same, as in the previous posts: Finding overall and per core CPU utilization and Find process IDs of a running process by name. Read the information present in the /proc/ directory. To get which processes are running we can read the directories with numbers as their names in the /proc/ directory. To generate a process tree we need to establish a process child relationship within the running processes. Each process has a parent (the first generated process is an exception), and it is stored in the process table entry of that process. We need to fetch the parent process id for each running process inorder to establish the tree. Here’s the plan. Continue reading “Generate the process tree of a Linux system” →

phoxis Computer Science, Linux Programming

Find process IDs of a running process by name

In this post I will talk about a procedure to find the process IDs of a running process by name, which can then be used to send signals or do other stuffs. For example if you have multiple instances of bash opened, this should be able to get you the list of process IDs (PIDs) of the bash instances.

Firstly, a shell utility is already available called pidof which is a part of the sysvinit-tools package. There are a whole bunch of tools in this package which lets you query PID based on different requirements, send signals to set of processes, etc. Just check out the stuff.

I will only mention the outline of how this is done and post the sourcecodes to do it. After that this can be extended to have many features just like the tools of sysvinit-tools package or more.
Continue reading “Find process IDs of a running process by name” →

phoxis Computer Science, Linux Programming

Finding overall and per core CPU utilization

Today I will post about how to monitor CPU usage by processor in Linux. As you might have expected this will simply access the CPU time information from /proc pseudo-filesystem and report the results.

The proc filesystem or the Procfs is a special filesystem which gives you a view into the kernel data. No files in procfs exists actually in the disk. There is no disk inodes and thus storage related to the files. Instead of going into procfs I will redirect you to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procfs. Let’s get in.
Continue reading “Finding overall and per core CPU utilization” →

phoxis Coding Discussions, Computer Science

Find pairs of numbers in an array with difference ‘k’

The problem statement is, an long array is given with n elements, we need to find all the pairs of numbers in this long array which have a constant difference k. I will post three methods. The first method is the brute force method and has a runtime complexity O (n2), the next method has runtime complexity O (n*log (n)), and the last one will have the runtime complexity O (n).

Continue reading “Find pairs of numbers in an array with difference ‘k’” →

phoxis Coding Discussions, Computer Science

Jumble word solver again

I have already posted a jumbled word solver written in C language, although what I posted is actually become old, as I have changed some of the things in the code. I will update the post with this (hope to update!) with the new changes, but before it I would like to post the the same stuff in other languages and with different datastructure. Recently I am learning Perl and brushing up C++, therefore I will post jumble word solver written in C++ and Perl in this post.
Continue reading “Jumble word solver again” →