

Even on freshly installed systems, there are usually quite a few processes running in the background, and ps will identify each one. This will probably produce a lot of output in your terminal.
x – list processes that don’t belong to any tty.u – display user oriented format (displays additional information about running processes).Using the same options in a different syntax may produce a different result, so yes, syntax does matter. Notice that this is using BSD syntax (no dashes). If there’s only one thing you remember after reading this tutorial, it should be this command. The following command will show all running processes on the system, and is probably the most used ps command in general. To get started, use some of the following commands on your own system, and you’ll eventually have it mastered. It’s easiest to learn about the ps command through examples. As such, the current iteration has been adapted to accept syntaxes from UNIX (options preceded with a dash), BSD (options with no dash), and GNU (options preceded by two dashes). It’s a very old command that has found its way onto every (or nearly every) UNIX, BSD, and Linux system since the early 70s. The ps command can be a little confusing to beginners because it accepts options in a few different syntaxes.
