6.44. Installing Psmisc-20.1

Estimated build time:           1 minute
Estimated required disk space:  500 KB

6.44.1. Installation of Psmisc

Install Psmisc by running the following commands:

./configure --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/ &&
make &&
make install

psmisc installs the /usr/share/man/man1/pidof.1 man page, but psmisc's pidof program isn't installed by default. Generally that isn't a problem because we install the sysvinit package later on which provides us with a better pidof program.

It's up to you now to decide if you are going to use the sysvinit package which provides a pidof program, or not. If you are going to, you should remove psmisc's pidof man page by running:

rm /usr/share/man/man1/pidof.1

If you're not going to use sysvinit, you should complete this package's installation by creating the /bin/pidof symlink by running:

cd /bin
ln -s killall pidof

6.44.2. Command explanations

--exec-prefix=/: This will cause the programs to be installed in /bin rather than in /usr/bin. The programs in this package are often used in bootscripts, so they should be in the /bin directory so they can be used when the /usr partition isn't mounted yet.

6.44.3. Contents

The Psmisc package contains the fuser, killall, pidof and pstree programs.

6.44.4. Description

6.44.4.1. fuser

fuser displays the PIDs of processes using the specified files or file systems.

6.44.4.2. killall

killall sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands.

6.44.4.3. pidof

Pidof finds the process id's (pids) of the named programs and prints those id's on standard output.

6.44.4.4. pstree

pstree shows running processes as a tree.

6.44.5. Dependencies

Psmisc-20.1 needs the following to be installed:


sh from the bash package

as from the binutils package
ld from the binutils package

cmp from the diffutils package

chmod from the fileutils package
cp from the fileutils package
ls from the fileutils package
mv from the fileutils package
rm from the fileutils package

cc from the gcc package

egrep from the grep package
grep from the grep package

make from the make package

sed from the sed package

basename from the sh-utils package
expr from the sh-utils package
sleep from the sh-utils package
uname from the sh-utils package

cat from the textutils package
tr from the textutils package