Pstree is a clone of the standard Linux pstree command, which displays
process information in a heirarchical fashion. It builds and runs on
SLS linux, RedHat linux (tested rhel3,centos 7), Debian linux,
FreeBSD (tested on 4.4 & 4.8,)
MacOS 10.4 through 10.12, and
Minix 3. Unlike the
standard pstree, it uses either sysctl() [macOS], kvm_getprocs()
[FreeBSD 4.?] or /proc [SLS linux] as needed.
pstree is free software; it is released under a BSD-style license that allows you to do as you wish with it as long as you don’t attempt to claim it as your own work.
To install pstree, do
$ ./configure.sh
$ make
then become root and do
# make install
If pstree needs to use sysctl() or kvm_getprocs() to read process
information, it will be installed as a setuid process to allow
it to read all of the process data.
=v0.7=
A small handful of tweaks to catch up to changes in MacOS (echo
bit me again, so I modified configure.inc to generate a local
echo command that does echo -n properly), support for Minix 3.3
(new /proc filesystem support), and a couple of bugfixes to deal
with zero-length command lines.)
=v0.6=
FreeBSD 7.1 changed some of its kernel data structures, which
made the whole kvm_… world just stop working. After extensive
work with grep, I figured out what had become of them and modified
ps-etc to work here.
And then I found a bug in the BSD support, in that if a process
modified its command line, those changes wouldn't show up in
`pstree -a`. It turns out that modified command lines end up in
`argv[0]`, which I was clipping off in favor of the `kinfo_proc`
process name. So I had to redo that code to use `argv[0]` instead,
and as a side-effect of that I was able to track changes in command
names, so I can do the same thing that FreeBSD does with `ps -a` and
put a `(command)` suffix onto the output if `argv[0]` was actually
changed.
->\*whew!\*<-
On top of all that, I modified the way commandlines are printed to
have embedded spaces display as spaces instead of `\040` -- the
`-s` option disables that new feature if you wish to see the old
behavior.
=v0.5=
basename() on the BSDs uses a static buffer to hold the new
basename. This makes it pretty much impossible to use basename()
for anything non-trivial unless you surround it with a strdup()
wrapper. The 0.5 release corrects this misfeature by replacing
basename() with a local function.
=v0.4=
1. Internal range checking to take away the fun of having a setuid
program possibly doing a stack overrun and giving J. Random.
Hacker a free doorway to root privileges.
2. Implement the
3. Try to automatically configure whether to look at -A
option (like -a, except it shows, if possible, the full
pathname to the program name.) /proc or use
sysctl() or kvm_getprocs().
=v0.3=
A README file, support for the -l
option, automatic window width detection, more work on sysctl()
vs kvm_getprocs() so that it will work on FreeBSD versions that
don’t support kvm_getprocs() anymore.
=v0.2= The first release that works on more than one platform; 0.2 works on FreeBSD 4.x and SLS linux, and doesn’t have an embarrassing number of misfeatures and/or bugs.
=v0.1= The initial release, which almost works on SLS linux.