prtstat

Additional Notes

prtstat displays detailed statistics about a running process by reading information from the /proc filesystem. It shows the process name, PID, parent PID, state, user and system CPU time, priority, nice value, memory usage, I/O counters, signal masks, and scheduling information.

System administrators and developers use prtstat to get a comprehensive snapshot of a process's state and resource usage. It provides more detail than ps -p PID in a single consolidated view, though much of the same information is available from /proc/PID/stat and /proc/PID/status.

Syntax

prtstat [options] [pid...]

Parameters

• pid: One or more process IDs to examine.

Common Options

• -r, --raw: Output in raw format (machine-parseable).
• -n, --nocolumns: Suppress column headers.
• -h, --help: Show help and exit.
• -v, --version: Show version information.

Examples

prtstat 1234

Display statistics for PID 1234.

prtstat $$ 

Show statistics for the current shell process.

prtstat 1

Show statistics for the init or systemd process.

prtstat -r 1234 > stats.txt

Save raw process statistics to a file.

prtstat $(pidof nginx)

Show statistics for all nginx processes.

prtstat -n 1234

Show statistics without column headers.

Practical Notes

• prtstat reads from /proc/PID/stat. If the process terminates before prtstat reads it, an error is returned.
• Most of the same information is available from ps -p PID -o pid,ppid,stat,etime,time,%cpu,%mem,rss,vsz or by reading /proc/PID/status directly.
• prtstat is part of the psmisc package on some distributions. Install with sudo apt install psmisc.
• For continuous monitoring, use top, htop, or pidstat from the sysstat package.
• The raw output (-r) is useful for parsing in scripts, though directly reading /proc/PID/stat may be simpler.