Occasionally, processes may consume a lot of resources and need to be killed. If a command takes too long to complete, you can run it as a background process by adding an ampersand (&) at the end of the command so you can use the shell for other tasks.
As the process occupies the shell, you have to wait until it is finished before executing other commands. If there are no possible combinations left, the system can reuse old PIDs for newer processes.Ī process can be initiated as a foreground or background process.īy default, all commands that run in the shell will start as foreground processes. For instance, Google Chrome will start a different process each time a new tab is opened.Įach Linux process is assigned a unique PID (process identification number). However, an application can run multiple processes for different tasks. They can be launched when opening an application or when issuing a command through the command-line terminal.Ī command can only generate a process. How to List Running Processes in Linux?Ī process is the execution of a program.
