Scenario

System resources are being consumed by an unusually large process tree. You need to identify the parent process with the most children and document its hierarchy.

Task

Identify the process tree with the highest number of child processes and save its hierarchy-including PIDs and full command names (arguments)-to: /home/devops/process_tree_report.txt.

Linux provides the pstree command to display full hierarchical process trees, including PIDs and command arguments.

Example

The file /home/devops/process_tree_report.txt should look similar to this:

spawn_many_workers.sh,159 /home/devops/spawn_many_workers.sh
 ├─sleep,209 infinity
 ├─spawn_many_workers.sh,190 /home/devops/spawn_many_workers.sh
 │  └─sleep,220 60
 ├─spawn_many_workers.sh,191 /home/devops/spawn_many_workers.sh
 ...

Step 1: Display the full process tree

pstree -p -a

Shows all process hierarchies with PIDs (-p) and command arguments (-a). Visually identify which parent has the most children (look for many branches).

Step 2: Count child processes for the suspicious parent

pstree -p 8234 | wc -l

Replace 8234 with the actual PID of the problematic parent process identified in Step 1.

Step 3: Save the process tree to a file

pstree -p -a 8234 > /home/devops/process_tree_report.txt

Replace 8234 with the actual PID. Saves the problematic hierarchy with all PIDs and command names for analysis.