How To Install procps on Debian 9

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install procps on Debian 9.

What is procps

procps is:

This package provides command line and full screen utilities for browsing procfs, a “pseudo” file system dynamically generated by the kernel to provide information about the status of entries in its process table (such as whether the process is running, stopped, or a “zombie”).

It contains free, kill, pkill, pgrep, pmap, ps, pwdx, skill, slabtop, snice, sysctl, tload, top, uptime, vmstat, w, and watch.

There are three methods to install procps on Debian 9. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install procps Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install procps using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install procps

Install procps Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install procps using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install procps

Install procps Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install procps using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install procps

How To Uninstall procps on Debian 9

To uninstall only the procps package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove procps

Uninstall procps And Its Dependencies

To uninstall procps and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 9, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove procps

Remove procps Configurations and Data

To remove procps configuration and data from Debian 9 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge procps

Remove procps configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove procps configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge procps

Dependencies

procps have the following dependencies:

• libc6
• libncurses5
• libncursesw5
• libprocps6
• libtinfo5
• lsb-base
• init-system-helpers

References

• procps website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install procps package on Debian 9 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.