2001-05-07 01:38:33 -04:00
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The xps program displays and continuously updates in an X Window the
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Unix processes as a tree or forest. The roots of the tree are on the
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left-hand side and the leaf processes (with no children) are on the
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right-hand side. The status of each process (running, sleeping,
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stopped, etc.) can be indicated by a color. Different users can appear
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as different colors too.
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Within each level, processes are grouped so that those with the same
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parent process id are grouped together. Within this, processes are
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arranged by userid with lower number uid's appearing towards the
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top. In general, the order of children is the order in which they were
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2003-02-25 21:57:55 -05:00
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spawned, with the older processes appearing towards the top.
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2001-05-07 01:38:33 -04:00
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In contrast to pstree and many tree-widget based programs, the overall
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tree display uses diagonal lines; some effort is made to effectively
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use the full 2-dimensional area of the screen by balancing levels and
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centering the children of a node between their parent. A goal of the
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program is to visually give a picture of what's going on. So when
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possible processes are kept close to their parents so one needn't
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scroll around too much and so that there isn't a lot of redrawing as
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processes are created or destroyed.
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One can click on a process to get more information (via ps) about that
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process, send a signal to the process, or set its priority, assuming
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you have the permission to do so. Since programs of this ilk can
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consume a bit of CPU on their own, some effort has been made to turn
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2003-02-25 21:57:55 -05:00
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off the update process when the program is iconified or not
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2001-05-07 01:38:33 -04:00
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visible.
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