Determining the process ID: a follow-up

In a follow-up to last week's item on killing a Virtual PC related process (also see previous), Snibor Eoj points out that the 'top' command only reveals the processes that are consuming the greatest number of system resources. He writes:

"'top' is not always the best way to obtain a process ID because it does not show every process, just the most resource intensive. 'ps' will list all the processes, specifically, 'ps -auxww' will return a detailed list of all processes running on your machine. However, this command can be cumbersome when searching for a specific process, so you can also pipe the results through grep. For example: 'ps -auxww | grep VirtualPC_Services' reveals the VPC related item."

Update: Luis Aguila writes: "The number of processes displayed by the 'top' command is affected by the size of the Terminal window. If you have a large monitor and you want to see more processes, just make the Terminal window taller." Rand Arnold notes that making the font size smaller also increases the number of viewable items.