Monitor a Long Running Process with Control T

One of the nice things about being in Linux exile is learning about new things that I hadn’t noticed were missing from my life, like being able to tell if a process has hung, or it’s just taking a really long time.

tom@binky:~:$ cp Downloads/FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso .
  ...
  ^t
  ...
load: 0.17  cmd: cp 20253 running 0.00u 0.16s
Downloads/FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso -> ./FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso  35%

Hitting Control-t while waiting for a process to complete outputs, and ‘scuse me while I quote from the manpage:

the current load average, the name of the command in the foreground, its process ID, the symbolic wait channel, the number of user and system seconds used, the percentage of cpu the process is getting, and the resident set size of the process.

It’s basically all there, although I don’t see the resident size on Mac OSX (where I took the manpage snippet from).