procps-ng
A set of utilities that read /proc.
procps-ng provides ps, top, free, kill, vmstat, uptime, pgrep, pkill, slabtop, sysctl, and many other utilities that read information from /proc. The "ng" in the name reflects a 2010s rewrite of the older procps codebase, which had become unmaintained; procps-ng has been the default in distribution repositories since around 2012.
The package is one of those quietly central pieces of any Linux system. ps and top are the first commands any sysadmin reaches for to ask "what's running?", and the friendlier htop is a relatively recent visitor to a domain that procps-ng has owned for decades.
Craig Small leads procps-ng development. The project is GPL-licensed, packaged on every distribution, and updated at a steady pace as new /proc fields are exposed by recent kernels. On systems with systemd, the systemd-cgtop and systemd-cgls tools provide cgroup-aware alternatives to top, but the basic procps-ng utilities remain in daily use.
Install
Already preinstalled on Linux.
Authors
- procps-ng team