sshd chain is pstree output?

jhwilliams · 01-07-2009, 09:50 PM

Looking at the output of pstree on my server at a given time while I'm ssh'd to it, I see this:

Code:

     ├─sshd───sshd───sshd───bash───pstree

and ps aux has:

Code:

root      2296  0.0  0.0  25840  1236 ?        Ss   22:42   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
root      2423  0.0  0.0  36792  2684 ?        Ss   22:43   0:00 sshd: jameson [priv]
jameson   2425  0.0  0.0  36932  1740 ?        S    22:43   0:00 sshd: jameson@pts/0

I could understand that a privileged sshd daemon launches a process for jameson, but what is the intermediary [priv] one about?

acid_kewpie · 01-09-2009, 07:08 AM

the main sshd process will spawn a thread for each connection, and that thread then spawns the users environment. I think.