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I'm in a Linux class and one of my assignment questions is to find out the total number of processes running on the server.

I have used the ps -aux command to list all the processes but I was wondering if there was a way to number the output so I can count them easier

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  • 3
    Be conscious of the XY Problem...
    – Attie
    Commented Oct 9, 2018 at 16:00
  • thanks for the help, I used the ps -aux | wc -l command and that worked
    – cole
    Commented Oct 9, 2018 at 16:05
  • As the answers say, piping to wc-l will give you the number of lines, but it's a good idea to suppress the header line with ps -auxh. Also, ps -auxh | less -N will allow you scroll the output with the lines enumerated.
    – AFH
    Commented Oct 9, 2018 at 16:06

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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ps -aux | wc -l

Then subtract the number of lines used in the header and the footer of the command.

wc counts words but the -l counts lines

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  • Have a look in the man page... --no-headers is handy
    – Attie
    Commented Oct 9, 2018 at 16:03
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Others have mentioned wc -l for producing a total line count... however there is also nl which might be more in keeping with your "number the output" question - it prepends line numbers:

$ ps -aux --no-headers | nl | head
     1  root         1  0.0  0.0  39872  7532 ?        Ss   Sep24   7:07 /sbin/init
     2  root         2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep24   0:02 [kthreadd]
     3  root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep24   0:44 [ksoftirqd/0]
     4  root         5  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   Sep24   0:00 [kworker/0:0H]
     5  root         7  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep24  16:50 [rcu_sched]
     6  root         8  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep24   0:00 [rcu_bh]
     7  root         9  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep24   0:05 [migration/0]
     8  root        10  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep24   0:04 [watchdog/0]
     9  root        11  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep24   0:05 [watchdog/1]
    10  root        12  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Sep24   0:05 [migration/1]
[...]
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  • | tail -n=1 | cut -d' ' -f1 if added to the above will show you the number of the last line
    – K7AAY
    Commented Oct 9, 2018 at 22:47
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Try piping the output to the word count program, wc

ps -aux | wc -l

will give you the total number of lines outputted by the ps command.

Hope this helps.

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