This is the 'ips' program which stands for 'intelligent ps'. It displays process status in a versatile and efficient manner.
This has been tested under Linux kernel version 2.6.3, but should work reasonably for other kernel versions too.
The collection of process data in ips is dependent on the /proc layout so it will not work on other operating systems without modification. Almost all of the system-dependent code should be in linux.c.
To build ips you can probably just type 'make' with no problems. The only major configuration option is to disable the use of X11 if you don't need or want it. Modify the Makefile to do this.
There is a man page called ips.man which explains the features and use of the program.
There is a system-wide default initialization file called ips.init which you might want to install in /usr/local/lib. If you would rather put the initialization file elsewhere, the definition for it is in ips.h.
If you trust the program, you can make it suid root so that it can display all of the columns for all users. Note that it might be a security problem for some process information to be known by everybody (especially the environment variables of a process). You must decide if that is a problem for your site. I have tried to avoid any other security problems, but of course I can't guarantee that there isn't a problem. So running ips suid root is at your own risk. The ips program will run fine without being suid root, but in this case some of the data it attempts to display will not be available for normal users.
David I. Bell
dbell@canb.auug.org.au
18 August 2004