How to find out what is this process for?

Question

I have this 'java' process running for 3 hours ( I guess ). I didn't see it before and I wonder how could I find out where it's coming from?

Here is a screenshot:

EDIT: ok I figured it out, it's a freenet stuff I installed few days ago.

Answer 1

What does a

ps  -p 1983  -f   # 1983 being the PID your screenshot shows

tell you about it?

Answer 2

Run htop. It's like top, only better. In particular, htop shows the full command line, and you can scroll horizontally to see more of it.

Answer 3

You can also run pstree from the psmisc package to view a given PID and all its parents, all the way back to init or PID 1. e.g.

pstree -s -p 1983

You can use pstree's -A option for ASCII line-drawing chars rather than terminal-specific (e.g. ANSI/vt100/xterm/linux) line-drawing chars.

e.g. an example from my system:

$ pstree -A -s -p 9879 
init(1)---screen(13578)---bash(13642)---mutt(9879)

If it's somehow not in your distro, psmisc is at http://psmisc.sf.net/

Answer 4

My personal favorite is ps -wwwaux|grep java|grep -v grep.

You can also toggle the top-command-line (i.e. show parameters of the processes in top) by pressing c in top.