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The output will give you the PID(s) of the process without you having to use the 
ps
 
command.
Configuring arguments to ps
Continuing with the 
ps
 command, there are several useful arguments you can give 
in order to change the way in which it produces an output. If you use the 
a
 option, 
you'll see more information than you normally would:
ps a 
This will produce an output something like the following:
Figure 7.3: The output of the ps a command
With 
ps a
, we're seeing the same output as before, but with additional information, 
as well as column headings at the top. We now see a heading for 
PID
, 
TTY
, 
STAT
, 
TIME
, and 
COMMAND
. From this new output, you can see that the 
vim
 processes I have 
running are editing a file named 
testfile
. This is great to know, because if I had 
more than one 
vim
 session open and one of them was misbehaving, I would probably 
want to know which one I specifically needed to stop.
We already saw the 
PID
 and 
COMMAND
 fields, although we didn't see a formal heading 
at the top. The 
PID
 column we've already covered, so I won't go into any additional 
detail about that. The 
COMMAND
 field tells us the actual command being run, which is 
very useful if we either want to ensure we're managing the correct process or to see 
what a particular user is running (I'll demonstrate how to display processes for other 
users soon).

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Controlling and Managing Processes