pst: a reproduction of pstree

pst is a command-line utility that creates visual trees of your running processes on Unix-like systems.

pst is a reproduction of pstree, written in Python.

Installation

pst currently supports Python 2.x-3.x.

PyPI

$ sudo pip install pst

Manual

First clone the pst repository and go into the directory.

$ git clone git://github.com/topunix/pst.git
$ cd pst

Then run the command below.

$ sudo python setup.py install

If you don't have root permission (or don't want to install pst with sudo), try:

$ python setup.py install --prefix=~/.local
$ export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH

Usage

pst shows running processes as a tree. The tree is rooted at either pid or init if pid is omitted. If a user name is specified, all process trees rooted at processes owned by that user are shown

Command Line Options

-h, --help

Display a help message

-v, --version

Display the version of pst

-o, --output string

Directs the output to a file name of your choice

-w, --write

When specified, pst writes to stdout. By default, pst uses less to page the output.

-u, --user string

Show only trees rooted at processes of this user

-p, --pid integer

Start at this pid; default is 1 (init)

Demo

Demos speak more than a thousand words! Here's me running pst on ubuntu. As you can see, you can select a pid and see its child processes:

More Examples

shell> 
shell> pst
shell> pst --help
shell> pst -o trees.txt 
shell> pst --user postgres