[linux] List of Java processes

How can I list all Java processes in bash? I need an command line. I know there is command ps but I don't know what parameters I need to use.

ps axuwww | grep java | grep -v grep

The above will

• show you all processes with long lines (arg: www)
• filter (grep) only lines what contain the word java, and
• filter out the line "grep java" :)

(btw, this example is not the effective one, but simple to remember) ;)

you can pipe the above to another commands, for example:

ps axuwww | grep java | grep -v grep | sed '.....'  | while read something
do
    something_another $something
done

etc...

Recent Java comes with Java Virtual Machine Process Status Tool "jps"

http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/tooldocs/share/jps.html

For example,

[nsushkin@fulton support]$ jps -m
2120 Main --userdir /home/nsushkin/.netbeans/7.0 --branding nb
26546 charles.jar
17600 Jps -m

try:

ps aux | grep java

and see how you get on

pgrep -l java
ps -ef | grep java

jps & jcmd wasn't showing me any results when I tried it using using openjdk-1.8 on redhat linux. But even if it did it only shows processes under the current user which doesn't work in my case. Using the ps|grep is what I ended up doing but the class path for some java apps can be extremely long which makes results illegible so I used sed to remove it. This is a bit rough still but removes everything except: PID, User, java-class/jar, args.

ps -o pid,user,cmd -C java | sed -e 's/\([0-9]\+ *[^ ]*\) *[^ ]* *\([^$]*\)/\1 \2/' -e 's/-c[^ ]* [^ ]* \|-[^ ]* //g'

Results look something like:

  PID USER     CMD
11251 userb org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerMain ../config/zookeeper.properties
19574 userb com.intellij.idea.Main
28807 root org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.RunNiFi run
28829 root org.apache.nifi.NiFi

An alternative on windows to list all processes is:

WMIC path win32_process where "Caption='java.exe'" get ProcessId,Commandline

But that is going to need some parsing to make it more legible.

 ps -eaf | grep [j]ava

It's better since it will only show you the active processes not including this command that also got java string the [] does the trick

If I want simply list java processes, use:

ps -A | grep java

This will return all the running java processes in linux environment. Then you can kill the process using the process ID.

ps -e|grep java

Starting from Java 7, the simplest way and less error prone is to simply use the command jcmd that is part of the JDK such that it will work the same way on all OS.

Example:

> jcmd
5485 sun.tools.jcmd.JCmd
2125 MyProgram

jcmd allows to send diagnostic command requests to a running Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

More details about how to use jcmd.

See also the jcmd Utility

The following commands will return only Java ProcessIDs. These commands are very useful especially whenever you want to feed another process by these return values (java PIDs).

sudo netstat -nlpt | awk '/java/ {print $7}' | tr '/java' ' '

sudo netstat -nlpt | awk '/java/ {print $7}' | sed 's/\/java/ /g'

But if you remove the latest pipe, you will be noticed these are java process

sudo netstat -nlpt | awk '/java/ {print $7}'

sudo netstat -nlpt | awk '/java/ {print $7}'

To know the list of java running on the linux machine. ps -e | grep java

jps -lV

is most useful. Prints just pid and qualified main class name:

2472 com.intellij.idea.Main
11111 sun.tools.jps.Jps
9030 play.server.Server
2752 org.jetbrains.idea.maven.server.RemoteMavenServer

For better output format check this command:

ps -fC java

You can use single command pgrep as well (doesn't require you to use pipes and multiple commands):

pgrep -fl java

I use this (good on Debian 8): alias psj='ps --no-headers -ww -C java -o pid,user,start_time,command'

There's a lot of ways of doing this. You can use java.lang.ProcessBuilder and "pgrep" to get the process id (PID) with something like: pgrep -fl java | awk {'print $1'}. Or, if you are running under Linux, you can query the /proc directory.

I know, this seems horrible, and non portable, and even poorly implemented, I agree. But because Java actually runs in a VM, for some absurd reason that I can't really figure out after more then 15 years working the JDK, is why it isn't possible to see things outside the JVM space, it's really ridiculous with you think about it. You can do everything else, even fork and join child processes (those were an horrible way of multitasking when the world didn't know about threads or pthreads, what a hell! what's going in on with Java?! :).

This will give an immense discussion I know, but anyways, there's a very good API that I already used in my projects and it's stable enough (it's OSS so you still need to stress test every version you use before really trusting the API): https://github.com/jezhumble/javasysmon

JavaDoc: http://jezhumble.github.io/javasysmon/, search for the class com.jezhumble.javasysmon.OsProcess, she will do the trick. Hope it helped, best of luck.

ps aux | grep java

or

$ ps -fea|grep -i java

When I want to know if a certain Java class is getting executed, I use the following command line:

ps ww -f -C java | grep "fully.qualified.name.of.class"

From the OS side view, the process's command name is "java". The "ww" option widens the colum's maximum characters, so it's possible to grep the FQN of the related class.