Two Processes for an ssh Session or Log-in

devUnix · 07-29-2013, 04:44 AM

Hi,

Why do I see two different processes for my ssh session?

Why there is my UID in the User field (in the first column) for the Dev@pts/16 process?

What does [priv] means in the first instance of my ssh session?

Code:

[root@dev-host ~]# ps auxf | grep -E "(sshd$|Dev)"
root      3009  0.0  0.0  60744  1196 ?        Ss    2012   0:01 /usr/sbin/sshd
root     12941  0.0  0.1 104584  4936 ?        Ss   09:31   0:00  \_ sshd: Dev [priv]
14703    12947  0.0  0.0 104584  2452 ?        S    09:31   0:00  |   \_ sshd: Dev@pts/16

Please Note: Actually, I logged-in to the server as Dev and then switched user to root.

Thanks,
Dev.

pan64 · 07-29-2013, 05:02 AM

/usr/sbin/sshd [3009] is a daemon process, actually it only listens on the given port and starts a new sshd process [12941] if required. That will serve your request and therefore will fork a child process [12947], will assign it to you, open a terminal and run a login shell.