Technical Notes

Manpages - ipcs.1

NAME

ipcs - show information on IPC facilities

SYNOPSIS

ipcs [options]

DESCRIPTION

ipcs shows information on System V inter-process communication facilities. By default it shows information about all three resources: shared memory segments, message queues, and semaphore arrays.

OPTIONS

-i, –id id

Show full details on just the one resource element identified by id. This option needs to be combined with one of the three resource options: -m, -q or -s.

-h, –help

Display help text and exit.

-V, –version

Print version and exit.

Resource options

-m, –shmems

Write information about active shared memory segments.

-q, –queues

Write information about active message queues.

-s, –semaphores

Write information about active semaphore sets.

-a, –all

Write information about all three resources (default).

Output formats

Of these options only one takes effect: the last one specified.

-c, –creator

Show creator and owner.

-l, –limits

Show resource limits.

-p, –pid

Show PIDs of creator and last operator.

-t, –time

Write time information. The time of the last control operation that changed the access permissions for all facilities, the time of the last *msgsnd*(2) and *msgrcv*(2) operations on message queues, the time of the last *shmat*(2) and *shmdt*(2) operations on shared memory, and the time of the last *semop*(2) operation on semaphores.

-u, –summary

Show status summary.

Representation

These affect only the -l (–limits) option.

-b, –bytes

Print the sizes in bytes rather than in a human-readable format.

By default, the unit, sizes are expressed in, is byte, and unit prefixes are in power of 2^10 (1024). Abbreviations of symbols are exhibited truncated in order to reach a better readability, by exhibiting alone the first letter of them; examples: "1 KiB" and "1 MiB" are respectively exhibited as "1 K" and "1 M", then omitting on purpose the mention "iB", which is part of these abbreviations.

–human

Print sizes in human-readable format.

CONFORMING TO

The Linux ipcs utility is not fully compatible to the POSIX ipcs utility. The Linux version does not support the POSIX -a, -b and -o options, but does support the -l and -u options not defined by POSIX. A portable application shall not use the -a, -b, -o, -l, and -u options.

NOTES

The current implementation of ipcs obtains information about available IPC resources by parsing the files in /proc/sysvipc. Before util-linux version v2.23, an alternate mechanism was used: the IPC_STAT command of *msgctl*(2), *semctl*(2), and *shmctl*(2). This mechanism is also used in later util-linux versions in the case where /proc is unavailable. A limitation of the IPC_STAT mechanism is that it can only be used to retrieve information about IPC resources for which the user has read permission.

AUTHORS

SEE ALSO

*ipcmk*(1), *ipcrm*(1), *msgrcv*(2), *msgsnd*(2), *semget*(2), *semop*(2), *shmat*(2), *shmdt*(2), *shmget*(2), *sysvipc*(7)

REPORTING BUGS

For bug reports, use the issue tracker at <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.

AVAILABILITY

The ipcs command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.