I am copying some files from an external drive to my desktop running Ubuntu. I can see the "File Operations" dialog which shows copying process.
How do I find this particular process in ps aux | grep
command? I thought it would be some cp
command but there is no cp
command running! So how does this copying work? Please provide any pointers.
Best Answer
The process name is
nautilus
. Nautilus contains its own code to copy files, this code is executed inside the nautilus process, not in a subprocess.You can see for yourself what subprocesses Nautilus runs by logging its system calls with strace:
The
clone
system call creates new processes (it's a generalization offork
). Theexecve
system call runs another program in the same process. Running another program thus entailsclone
followed byexecve
. You can quickly see what programs Nautilus executes (or tries to) withYou'll find that Nautilus creates subprocesses for some things such as previewing the content of certain types of files, but it does the file copying on its own.