Getting System Information

• uname

  • uname prints various different pieces of system information. Possible pieces of information are shown in the uname manual pages.

  • The -a flag will print all the information uname can print.

uname -a
Linux luria 3.10.0-514.2.2.el7.x86_64 \#1 SMP Tue Dec 6 23:06:41 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

• file

  • This will print out the file type of the given file.

file hello.txt
hello.txt: ASCII text

file my_directory.zip
my_directory.zip: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

• ps

  • Shows the running processes on the system. Pass it the argument aux to get extensive information about every running process on the system

# Prints information on every running process on the system
ps aux

# Pipe the output into grep and search for every process being run by a specific user
ps aux | grep "asoberan"
asoberan  6342  0.0  0.0 115716  2372 pts/124  Ss   May02   0:00 /bin/bash
asoberan  7855  0.0  0.0 302216  4668 pts/124  Sl+  15:25   0:00 srun --pty bash
asoberan  7873  0.0  0.0  96680   768 pts/124  S+   15:25   0:00 srun --pty bash

• htop

  • An interactive utility to see every running process on the system, as well as extensive information about the CPU, RAM, etc. usage on the system.

  • Useful to check this utility if you're worried about your own CPU and RAM usage on the head node.