Chapter 17: Taking Control of the System

Overview

By now, you should be starting to realize that the shell offers an enormous amount of power when it comes to administering your PC. The commands it provides gives you quick and efficient control over most aspects of your Linux setup. However, there's one area at which it truly excels: controlling the processes on your system.

Controlling processes is essential for administration of your system. You can tidy up crashed programs, for example, or even alter the priority of a program so that it runs with a little more consideration for other programs. Unlike with Windows, this degree of control is not considered out of bounds. This is just one more example of how Linux provides complete access to its inner workings and puts you in control.

Without further ado, let's take a look at what can be done.