Process Management Visualizer

Interactive Linux Process Management & Control

Process Tree Hierarchy

Process Table (Click headers to sort)

PID PPID USER STATE %CPU %MEM COMMAND

Process State Transitions

Running (R)
Executing on CPU
Sleeping (S)
Interruptible Sleep
Disk Sleep (D)
Uninterruptible
Stopped (T)
Paused
Zombie (Z)
Terminated, awaiting parent

State Information

Click on any state above to see detailed information about process states and transitions.

Process Management Commands

ps aux
Display all running processes with detailed information
top
Real-time process monitoring (animated simulation)
kill [PID]
Send SIGTERM to gracefully terminate a process
kill -9 [PID]
Send SIGKILL to force-terminate a process
nice -n [VAL]
Start a process with specified priority (-20 to 19)
renice [VAL] [PID]
Change priority of running process
bg
Resume suspended job in background
fg
Bring background job to foreground
jobs
List all jobs (background and suspended)
nohup [CMD]
Run command immune to hangups, output to nohup.out
user@linux:~$ Welcome to the Process Management Terminal Click any command above or type your own command below

Linux Process Signals

SIGTERM
Signal 15
Graceful termination request. Allows process to clean up resources, save state, and exit cleanly. Can be caught and handled.
SIGKILL
Signal 9
Immediate termination. Cannot be caught, blocked, or ignored. Process is killed instantly without cleanup. Use as last resort.
SIGHUP
Signal 1
Hangup detected. Sent when controlling terminal closes. Often used to reload configuration files without restarting.
SIGINT
Signal 2
Interrupt from keyboard (Ctrl+C). Requests process to stop. Can be caught to perform cleanup before exiting.
SIGSTOP
Signal 19
Pause process execution. Cannot be caught or ignored. Process enters stopped state (T) until SIGCONT received.
SIGCONT
Signal 18
Continue execution of stopped process. Resumes process that was paused by SIGSTOP or SIGTSTP (Ctrl+Z).
Signal Demo: Click any "Demo" button above to see signal behavior simulation

Process Priority (Nice Values)

Nice Value: 0
-20 (Highest Priority) 0 (Default) +19 (Lowest Priority)
Current Priority
Normal Priority (0)
CPU Time
Standard allocation
Use Case
General purpose tasks
Permission
User can set

Nice Value Guide

-20 to -1: High priority. Requires root/sudo. Used for critical system processes.

0: Default priority. Standard for most user processes.

1 to 19: Lower priority. Good for background tasks, batch jobs, or non-urgent operations.

Examples:

nice -n 10 ./backup.sh
renice -n -5 -p 1234
nice -n 19 ./heavy-computation

Process Management Quiz

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