About procees status
 

Friends ,

when i want to know "Is any process is running in my Linux Pc"? Then i run "ps -ef" command , but i can't understand the meaning of this command .

Suppose i want to know is "Dovecot" service running in my linux pc? then i found :
root 3441 1 0 09:43 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/dovecot
root 3445 3441 0 09:43 ? 00:00:00 dovecot-auth

Here i found 5 slot or section . But i can't understand what is the meaning of this ? plz inform me .....

The format here is:
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD

where
UID: user ID of process owner
PID: process ID
PPID: parent process ID
C: processor utilization for scheduling (obsolete)
STIME: start time
TTY: terminal attached to process
TIME: CPU time (in seconds)
CMD: command executing
(I cut and pasted this from http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/~cstaff/cour.../csi110.3.html)

Bottom line is that your output shows that dovecot is running. You can filter the output by piping to grep, i.e.
ps -ef | grep dovecot

ABout process status
 

Dear meng ,

I have littilebit confused about "ps -e" and "ps -ef" ? Suppose in this moment
i have installed "clamav" into my pc . Now i run firsly :

#ps -ef|grep clamd

root 3328 3218 0 13:00 pts/0 00:00:00 grep clamd

and when i run :
#ps -e |grep clamd

Then, it shows nothing . So now i am confused my "clamd" process running or not ?plz help ASAP....

It seems like the process clamd is not running. Here your grep command (grep clamd) is still running that why you see the line with command "grep clamd"

#ps -ef|grep clamd
root 3328 3218 0 13:00 pts/0 00:00:00 grep clamd

If you want to know the difference between various ps options then run man ps. It'll list out all the options and their details.
Cheers
- Jack

I'm not an expert, but I believe ps -e will provide less information than ps -ef. In particular, the name of the command is not included with ps -e. That's why ps -e | grep clamd returns nothing. ps -ef | grep clamd will always return something, namely the process grep clamd. However, if that's all that it returns, then clamd is not running. You can go for partial matches too, such as ps -ef | grep clam. (I don't know anything about clamav, but if clamd is definitely the process you are looking for, then it ain't running.)