The related Unix utility top provides a real-time view of the running processes.

[2] In Windows PowerShell, ps is a predefined command alias for the Get-Process cmdlet, which essentially serves the same purpose.

Users can pipeline ps with other commands, such as less to view the process status output one page at a time:

On operating systems that support the SUS and POSIX standards, ps commonly runs with the options -ef, where "-e" selects every process and "-f" chooses the "full" output format.

Most systems derived from BSD fail to accept the SUS and POSIX standard options because of historical conflicts.