Read Me

WHAT IS PSWATCH?

PSWatch is made to be an alternative to the well known
procps from Unix and Linux systems. At the moment it's
still under heavy development and new features are
included very often. To get the actual release, visit

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pswatch/

PSWatch is still a pre-alpha release, because the rapid
implementation of new and mostly still untested features.
There is no warrenty, that this program can't crash the
system or damage data. At the moment only developers
should really use this program. A first beta release is
planned in 3-4 weeks.

WHAT'S THE GOAL?

The goal is to build a program better than procps. I'll
try to provide all known functions from procps but in a 
more consistent way especially for parameters. This is 
why I only support one kind of options. Additional I
plan to implement a very detailed view for serveral 
processes. You can see the output of this detailed 
screen by using the -p option.

HOW CAN I USE THIS PROGRAM?

A manpages isn't available yet. Most time I spend on 
implementing new features and I have some other projects
need my concentration. So here is a short description
on using pswatch:

Options:
  -p <PID>       - detailled informations for process with 
                   process ID PID
  -l             - in conjunction with -p show short infos
                   for this process in a loop
  -d <seconds>   - refresh delay for the looped output
  -f <formatstr> - list of processes with specified 
                   informations
                   Valid format string characters are:
                   p - PID
                   P - ParentPID
                   G - Process Group ID (PGRP)
                   c - command
                   s - state
                   m - used memory in bytes
                   r - Resident Set Size (in byte) - RSS
                   1 - priority

Without any option a list of all processes is displayed.
-f overrides -p!

Examples:

pswatch -p 123
  display detailed informations for process with PID 123

pswatch -p 123 -l
  display short informations for process with PID 123
  in a loop, very useful for process inspection

pswatch -p 123 -l -d 1
  display short informations for process with PID 123
  in a loop with a refresh delay of 1 second

pswatch -f cps
  display list of processes and only display command name,
  PID and process state

WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS?

First there come more format string characters. That's fast
implemented, because only two switch-case's are relevant for 
this code. Then I'll beautify the detailed output. Memory
adresses are displayed as long int and not as adresses there, 
displaying correct timestamps is very important and many little 
bugfixes and a better optarg checking is required.