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Understanding the ps command
While managing our server, we'll need to understand what processes are running 
and how to manage them. Later in this chapter, we'll work through starting, 
stopping, and monitoring processes. But before we get to those concepts, we 
first need to be able to determine what is actually running on our server. The 
ps
 
command allows us to do this.

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Controlling and Managing Processes
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Viewing running processes with ps
When executed by itself, the 
ps
 command will show a list of processes run by the 
user who called the command:
Figure 7.2: The output of the ps command, when run as a normal user and with no options
In 
Figure 7.2
, you can see that when I ran the 
ps
 command as my own user with no 
options, it showed me a list of processes that I am running as myself. In this case, I 
have a 
vim
 session open (running in the background), and in the last line, we also see 
ps
 itself, which is also included in the output. We haven't gone through background 
processes yet, so don't worry about how I backgrounded 
vim
 just yet.
On the left side of the output, you'll see a number for each of the running processes. 
This is known as the