How to find still running processes in a terminal?

Question

When I try to close a tab in Gnome Terminal, it says:

Close this terminal? There is still a process running in this terminal. Closing the terminal will kill it.

How can I find out what is still running? Note that there is nothing in the output of jobs. Thanks.

If you're at the shell prompt while this message is shown, probably this is a nested shell (not the one directly started by the terminal emulator). Maybe you've started a `screen`, `tmux`, `script`, `ssh`, `mc` and turned the panels off, or just another shell by e.g. typing `bash`, or something along these lines. Press Ctrl+D or type `exit` to quit your shell, you'll see where you end up. — egmont, May 14 '16 at 14:54
A second `exit`will probably close it then. @egmont can you move this to an answer please. — Videonauth, May 14 '16 at 15:08

score 15 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 05 '16 at 18:50

15

ps T

Selects all processes associated with the terminal.

answered Aug 05 '16 at 18:50

tmcp

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Good, although may be a bit deceiving. Processes spawned via `nohup` command are disconnected from terminal, so don't block its closing. But they are still listed with this command. – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Aug 06 '16 at 08:50
Or just ps for that matter – user10089632 Feb 07 '18 at 09:20

NonStandardModel · Answer 2 · 2016-07-08T09:18:02.900

If you started some process in terminal (eg. gedit) than the Process ID (PID) (of bash) and Parent Process ID (PPID) (of gedit) for this two processes will be the same. This can be seen in the output of

ps -ef

command. To make it more readable lets first "pipe" the output to grep to find the PID of all "bash" processes currently running and than "pipe" it again to awk. The awk selects only the PID and process name fields (field 2 and 8) and outputs it to the screen.

ps -ef | grep bash | awk '{print $2 ": " $8}'

The number in the output is PID. You will use it to find what process was started in terminal that has that PID. Note that there can be more than one line of output if you have more than one terminal opened. Now to find the "child" processes (if any) of that terminal-sessions we can use this command:

ps -ef | awk '{if ($3 == EnterPID) print $2 ": " $8;}'

You must enter the PID number in place of EnterPID in the last command. If there is more than one PID for "bash" you must try them all.

The last command just looks the output of ps -ef and searches if PID (that you have found from previous command) and PPID are the same for any process.

More info:

man ps

man awk

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 14 '16 at 20:06

You can take a peak at the processes who list your shell's PID as parent. As you may or may not know , we can specify ps format

SHELLPID=$$ ; ps -e  -o cmd,pid,ppid | awk -v shell=$SHELLPID  '$NF~shell'

Here, we get the shell's PID from special variable $$ into SHELLPID , which then can be used by awk in pipe's subshell. Essentially we're just listing processes in form NAME,PID,Parent PID , and filter out only those who have the appropriate PID in the last column.

Rangerix · Answer 4 · 2018-07-23T05:02:06.700

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You can use htop. In Ubuntu 16.04 ( and higher), you can install it just by typing sudo apt-get install htop.

You can also use top .

edited Jul 23 '18 at 05:02

answered Oct 13 '17 at 02:41

Rangerix

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And how would you identify the processes in the current terminal using `htop`? – muru Jul 23 '18 at 05:29

How to find still running processes in a terminal?

4 Answers4