lp is a tool to list processes. It's similar to ps, but tuned for my everyday needs:

• lp tells me some things that I often care about which ps cannot tell me, such as the number of open file descriptors for a process.

• lp is not cluttered with things I rarely care about, such as the controlling tty of a process.

• lp is not encumbered with multiple flag regimes to maintain compatibility with decades of slightly different Unix tools (see: ps -ef vs. ps aux).

• More often than not, I use ps with grep, which has two annoying aspects:

  • The output elides the header row.
  • Unless you take care by writing something like grep [m]yprocess, the output will usually include both the process(es) you care about and the grep process.

  lp fixes this pragmatically by providing a few flags to filter the process list.

See lp -h for usage information.

lp is Linux-only for the time being.