Chapter 7. Welcome to the Processes

A program under execution is known as process. When an operating system gets booted up, multiple processes get started in order to provide various functionalities and user interfaces so that a user can easily perform the required tasks. For example, when we start a command line server, we will see a terminal with bash or any other shell process that has been started.

In Linux, we have full control over processes. It allows us to create, stop, and kill processes. In this chapter, we will see how a process is created and managed by using commands such as top, ps, and kill and by changing its scheduling priority. We will also see how a signal can lead to the sudden termination of a process and also the ways to handle signals in a script using the command trap. We will also see one of the beautiful features of processes called Inter-process communication, which allows them to communicate with each other.

This chapter will cover the following topics...