What’s the difference between lsof and fuser -uvm

lsofprocess

Both shows the number of files we're using.

Yet they both shows different results.

root@host [~]# lsof /home4
root@host [~]# lsof /home2
root@host [~]# lsof /home4

Then we got

fuser -uvm /home4

                     root       2621 Frce. (root)crond
                     root       2635 Frce. (root)atd
                     root       4554 frce. (root)S99firstboot
                     root       4768 .rce. (root)firstboot
                     root       6533 .rce. (root)setup
                     root      11042 Frce. (root)leechprotect
                     root      11049 Frce. (root)httpd
                     root      17885 Frce. (root)httpd
                     root      18163 .rce. (root)sshd
                     root      18184 .rce. (root)bash
                     nobody    18619 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18679 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18812 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18821 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18841 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18843 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18850 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18869 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18885 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18901 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     nobody    18914 Frce. (nobody)httpd
                     root      18932 .rc.. (root)flush-7:0
                     root      30728 Frce. (root)cphulkd
                     root      30756 Frce. (root)cpsrvd-ssl
                     root      30806 Frce. (root)cpdavd
                     root      30833 .rce. (root)queueprocd
                     root      30904 Frce. (root)tailwatchd
                     root      30913 Frce. (root)cpanellogd

Where did I went wrong?

Best Answer

The usage of the two are different.

For lsof, to show opened files for certain path only, put -- in front of first path specified:

lsof -- /home4
lsof -- /home4 /home2

lsof will show all opened file containing the path.

For fuser, on the other hand, show process opening the file you specified

fuser -uv <filename>

To show processes accessing a particular path, use -m

fuser -uvm /home3

fuser is more useful in identifying process id opening a particular file.

lsof is useful to find out all file(s) opened by particular process.

Related Solutions

Lsof and listening ports

sudo lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN
sudo lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN -P
sudo lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN -P -n
sudo lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN -n

All return the same 32 entries (... | wc -l) on my heavily used Lion MBP.

-P -n prevents lsof from doing name resolution, and it doesn't block. Missing either one of these, it can be very slow.

For UDP: sudo lsof -iUDP -P -n | egrep -v '(127|::1)'. Without -n and -P, it takes a long time.

Reminder: This does not include firewall settings.

Linux – Difference Between pkill and killall

The pgrep and pkill utilities were introduced in Sun's Solaris 7 and, as g33klord noted, they take a pattern as argument which is matched against the names of running processes. While pgrep merely prints a list of matching processes, pkill will send the specified signal (or SIGTERM by default) to the processes. The common options and semantics between pgrep and pkill comes in handy when you want to be careful and first review the list matching processes with pgrep, then proceed to kill them with pkill. pgrep and pkill are provided by the the procps package, which also provides other /proc file system utilities, such as ps, top, free, uptime among others.

The killall command is provided by the psmisc package, and differs from pkill in that, by default, it matches the argument name exactly (up to the first 15 characters) when determining the processes signals will be sent to. The -e, --exact option can be specified to also require exact matches for names longer than 15 characters. This makes killall somewhat safer to use compared to pkill. If the specified argument contains slash (/) characters, the argument is interpreted as a file name and processes running that particular file will be selected as signal recipients. killall also supports regular expression matching of process names, via the -r, --regexp option.

There are other differences as well. The killall command for instance has options for matching processes by age (-o, --older-than and -y, --younger-than), while pkill can be told to only kill processes on a specific terminal (via the -t option). Clearly then, the two commands have specific niches.

Note that the killall command on systems descendant from Unix System V (notably Sun's Solaris, IBM's AIX and HP's HP-UX) kills all processes killable by a particular user, effectively shutting down the system if run by root.

The Linux psmisc utilities have been ported to BSD (and in extension Mac OS X), hence killall there follows the "kill processes by name" semantics.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Lsof and listening ports

Linux – Difference Between pkill and killall

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