PROCINFO(8)
NAME
procinfo - display system status gathered from /proc
SYNOPSIS
procinfo [ -fsmadiDSbhv ] [ -nN ] [ -Ffile ]
DESCRIPTION
procinfo gathers some system data from the /proc directory
and prints it nicely formatted on the standard output
device.
The meanings of the fields are as follows:
Memory:
See the man page for free(1) (preferably the proc-
version of free).
Bootup:
The time the system was booted.
Load average:
The average number of jobs running, followed by the
number of runnable processes and the total number
of processes (if your kernel is recent enough),
followed by the PID of the last process run (idem).
user: The amount of time spent running jobs in user
space.
nice: The amount of time spent running niced jobs in user
space.
system:
The amount of time spent running in kernel space.
Note: the time spent servicing interrupts is not
counted by the kernel (and nothing that procinfo
can do about it).
idle: The amount of time spent doing nothing.
uptime:
The time that the system has been up. The above
four should more or less add up to this one.
page in:
The number of disk block paged into core from disk.
(A block is almost always 1 kilobyte).
page out:
The reverse of the above.
swap in:
The number of pages swapped in.
swap out:
The number of pages swapped out.
context:
The total number of context switches since bootup.
disk 1-4:
The number of times your hard disks have been
accessed. This won't work for 1.0.x/1.1.x kernels
unless you have applied the diskstat patch avail-
able elsewhere to your kernel, and might give sur-
prising results if all your hard disks are of the
same type (e.g. all IDE, all SCSI). [I'm not sure
to what extend this is still true with recent ker-
nels, but I don't have a mixed system so I can't
check.]
Interrupts:
This is either a single number for all IRQ channels
together if your kernel is older than version
1.0.5, or two rows of numbers for each IRQ channel
if your kernel is at version 1.0.5 or later. On
Intel architecture There are sixteen different IRQ
channels, and their default meanings are as fol-
lows:
0 Timer channel 0
1 Keyboard
2 Cascade for controller 2 (which controls IRQ
8-15)
3 Serial Port 2
4 Serial Port 1
5 Parallel Port 2
6 Floppy Diskette Controller
7 Parallel Port 1
8 Real-time Clock
9 Redirected to IRQ2
10 --
11 --
12 --
13 Math Coprocessor
14 Hard Disk Controller
15 --
Note that the meanings of the IRQ channels for par-
allel ports, serial ports and those left empty may
have been changed depending on your hardware setup.
If that's the case on your machine, you're probably
aware of it. If you're not, upgrade to at least
Linux 1.1.43 and let procinfo enlighten you about
who uses what.
Modules:
The modules (loadable device drivers) installed on
your machine, with their sizes in kilobytes. (Only
with -m or -a option). Modules with a use count
larger than 0 are marked with an asterisk.
Character and Block Devices:
All available devices with their major numbers.
(Only with -m or -a option).
File Systems:
All available file systems. (Only with -m or -a
option). Those that do not require an actual device
(like procfs itself) are noted between square
brackets.
OPTIONS
-f Run procinfo continuously full-screen.
-nN Pause N second between updates. This option implies
-f. It may contain a decimal point. The default is
5 seconds. When run by root with a pause of 0 sec-
onds, the program will run at the highest possible
priority level.
-m Show info about modules and device drivers instead
of CPU and memory stats.
-a Show all information that procinfo knows how to
find.
-d For memory, CPU times, paging, swapping, disk, con-
text and interrupt stats, display values per second
rather than totals. This option implies -f.
-D Same as -d, except that memory stats are displayed
as totals.
-S When running with -d or -D, always show values per
second, even when running with -n N with N greater
than one second.
-Ffile Redirect output to file (usually a tty). Also nice
if, for example, you want to run procinfo perma-
nently on a virtual console or on a terminal, by
starting it from init(8) with a line like:
p8:23:respawn:/usr/bin/procinfo -biDn1 -F/dev/tty8
-b If your kernel is recent enough to display separate
read and write numbers for disk I/O, the -b flag
makes procinfo display numbers of blocks rather
that numbers of I/O requests (neither of which is,
alas, reliably translatable into kilobytes).
-i Squeezes the IRQ portion of the display. Useful
(especially on DEC Alpha boxen with those 32 IRQ's
in them) if the display won't otherwise fit on the
screen. Won't help much of course if you really
have many IRQ's in use on your system, but that's
the price of progress, I suppose.
-h Print a brief help message.
-v Print version info.
INTERACTIVE COMMANDS
When running procinfo fullscreen, you can change its
behaviour by pressing n, d, D, S, i, m, a and b, which
have the same effect as the corresponding command line
options. In addition you can press q which quits the pro-
gram; s which switches back to the main screen after
pressing m or a; t which switches back to displaying
totals after pressing d or D; or Ctrl-L which refreshes
the screen.
FILES
/proc The proc file system.
BUGS
What, me worry?
SEE ALSO
free(1) uptime(1) w(1) init(8) proc(5).
AUTHOR
Sander van Malssen lt;svm@kozmix.ow.nl