L in u X ba sics for h acke rs g e t t I n g s t a r t e d w I t h

USER
The user who invoked the process
PID
The process ID
%CPU
The percent of CPU this process is using
%MEM
The percent of memory this process is using
COMMAND
The name of the command that started the process
In general, to perform any action on a process, we must specify its PID. 
Let’s see how to use this identifier to our advantage.
Filtering by Process Name
When we inquire about or perform an action on processes, we usually don’t 
want all of the processes displayed on the screen. It’s simply a problem of 
too much information. Most often, we want to find information on a single 
process. To do so, we can use the filtering command 
grep
, which I intro­
duced in Chapter 1.
To demonstrate, we’ll use the Metasploit exploitation framework, the 
most widely used exploitation framework and nearly every hacker’s good 
friend. This comes installed on your Kali system, so start Metasploit with 
the following:
kali >msfconsole
Once the exploitation framework has been started, let’s see whether 
we can find it in the list of processes. Metasploit has now taken over this 
terminal, so open another terminal. Now, use the 
ps aux
command and 
then pipe it (
|
) to 
grep
looking for the string 
msfconsole
, as in Listing 6­2.
kali >ps aux | grep msfconsole
1:36 ruby /usr/bin/msfconsole
root 39892 0.0 0.0 4304 940 pts/2 S+ 15:18 0:00 grep msfconsole
Listing 6-2: Filtering a ps search to find a particular process
From the filtered output in this listing, you should see all the processes 
that match the term 
msfconsole
. Here, you see the 
msfconsole
program itself 
from /usr/bin/msfconsole, and then you should see the 
grep
command you 
used to look for 
msfconsole
. Notice that the output did not include the column 
header list from 
ps
. Since the keyword, 
msfconsole
, is not in the header, it is not 
displayed. Even so, the results are displayed in the same format.
From this, you can learn some important information. If, for example, 
you need to know how many resources Metasploit is using, you can consult 

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Chapter 6
the third column (the CPU column), to see that it’s using 35.1 percent of 
your CPU, and consult the fourth column to see that it’s using 15.2 percent 
of your system memory. That’s quite a bit. It’s a demanding beast!