Controlling System Processes in Solaris

proc Commands
The proc tools are useful for tracing attributes of processes. These utilities include:

• pflags: Prints the tracing flags, pending and held signals and other /proc status information for each LWP.
• pcred: Prints credentials (ie, EUID/EGID, RUID/EGID, saved UID/GIDs).
• pmap: Prints process address space map.
• pldd: Lists dynamic libraries linked to the process.
• psig: Lists signal actions.
• pstack: Prints a stack trace for each LWP in the process.
• pfiles: Reports fstat, fcntl information for all open files.
• pwdx: Prints each process's working directory.
• pstop: Stops process.
• prun: Starts stopped process.
• pwait: Wait for specified processes to terminate.
• ptree: Prints process tree for process.
• ptime: Times the command using microstate accounting; does not time children.

There is one more commmand prstat, Can sort the output by key values supplied by the –s option –Cpu – sort by cpu usage
–Time – sort by process execution time
–Size – sort by process image size
–Rss – sort by process resident set size
–Pri – sort by process priority

Killing signals:
about psig: The psig command (new to Solaris 8) will print a list showing what the process’ response will be

to each of the 47 different signals.

–--> kill -9 PID, SIGKILL forces a process to release its resources and die. This could cause corruption
of data if the process is I/O intensive.
--> kill -23 PID,SIGSTOP. This is used in shell-based job control and is invoked when you hit a ^Z. Solaris 8 provides a pstop command which does the same thing. –To resume the process, use the prun command to restart the process from its suspended state.

Process control file:/proc//ctl file allows to write and can be used to send control messages to a process to enable a particular behavior.Stop/start options are provided.