We will go through them one-by-one to go over what they do: In order to view them, you can check them by going to the 'View' menu and checking the options in the 'Columns' menus. The process list shows various attributes about the running processes, many of which are not viewable by default. For instance, you can see in this view that all processes in the system are children of the root launchd 'parent', which is the first 'userland' process started in the system kernel upon booting (see our previous article on OS X system process organization). Since processes in OS X can launch other ones, this will show which ones are the respective parents and children of each other. One final option for viewing the processes is to see them 'heirarchically', which is available in the drop-down menu next to the filter box. In addition, you can use the 'Filter' search bar to find a given task by name (only names are searchable). You can limit this to showing only user processes, or only system processes, active processes, or inactive ones, etc., which can be convenient for isolating specific tasks. This is where you view and manage all processes in the system. There are no application preferences for Activity Monitor instead, there are options for changing the views and included statistics, all of which are directly available in the 'View' menu.

The second is the system statistics section at the bottom of the window, where you can view the overall used and available system resources in tab-separated sections. The first is the process list section at the top, where all running processes in the system can be viewed and checked for system resource usage. The main Activity Monitor window is comprised of two sections. There are other windows for viewing immediate CPU usage and CPU usage history, but those are relatively self-explanatory so I will only briefly touch on them later. When you launch Activity Monitor (available by default in the 'Utilities' folder), you can view the main window by pressing 'command-1' or by selecting 'Activity Monitor' from the 'Window' menu. Since these tools require knowledge of the Terminal (which I admit is one of the funnest aspect of OS X), Apple has compiled the function of these and similar tools into 'Activity Monitor' to make process management more user-friendly. These include 'top', 'kill', 'ps', 'df', and 'vm_stats', and are available in the BSD subsystem in OS X via the command line. With UNIX having many tasks running simultaneously, through the years developers have incorporated several command-line tools that allow for live process management.

Mac os list processes