process in top

[vaman]

I have series of ps processes in top but I am not able to find out from where it is getting triggered, tty field in top shows ?. so how can I foun dout from where this ps is getting generated, & eating considerable cpu.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

doing a ps -ef | grep pid until the ppid (parent process id) will help You work through to the process that spawned Your cpu eaters.

some systems also have pstree available, which does the very same thing in a nicer, graphical way.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

sorry - I forgot a few words in my post, I meant to say that You if You do ps -ef | grep and then do recusively the same for the ppid until it's 1 (init itself), You have built a process tree which exactly shows what spawned the process in question.

unless it's ppid is 1 , in which case You should try grep processname /sbin/init.d/* .
If it's not there, check out cron jobs or have a look into /etc/inittab.

If this all fails, do a find / -local -name and search the containing directory for any kind of readme info or logfiles.

best luck,
florian

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

I'm not really focussed today - the job might also have lost it's controlling terminal, e.g. was started from an X login session that abnormally terminated.