procps-ng 3.3.16

procps-ng version 3.3.16 was released today. Besides some documentation and library updates, there were a few incremental changes.

Zombie Hunting with pgrep

Ever wanted to find zombies? Perhaps processes with other states? pgrep has a shiny new runstate flag to help you which will match process against the runstate. I’m curious to see the use-cases for this flag; it certainly will get used (e.g. find my zombies) but as some processes bounce in and out of states (think Run to Sleep and back) it might add some confusion.

Snice plays nice with PIDs

Speaking of ancient corpses, snice was not matching against PIDs. The best use for snice is to not use it (as the man page says) but some people do and some people noticed it never matched against PIDs.
The issue was reading the process state up to 128 bytes, but process state lines are always longer than 128 bytes so a bounds check failed and it skipped that PID (and every other PID too).

Top Enhancements

Top got a bunch of love again in this release. If you ever wanted your processes to be shown in fuchsia? Perhaps goldenrod? With some earlier versions of top, you could by directly editing the toprc file but now everyone can have more than the standard 8 colours!

If you use the other filters parameter for some fancy process filtering in top, it now will save that configuration.

Collapsed children (process names are weird) get some help. If you are in tree view, you can collapse or fold the children processes under the parent. Their CPU is also added to the parent so there are no “missing” CPU ticks.

For people who use the One True Editor (which is, of course, VIM) you can use the vim navigation keys to move through the process list.

Where to find it?

You’ll find the latest version of procps either at our git repository or download a tarball.