The following is a demonstration of the pidpersec.d script.

Here the program is run on an idle system,

# ./pidpersec.d

TIME LASTPID PID/s

2005 Jun 9 22:15:09 3010 0

2005 Jun 9 22:15:10 3010 0

2005 Jun 9 22:15:11 3010 0

2005 Jun 9 22:15:12 3010 0

2005 Jun 9 22:15:13 3010 0

^C

This shows that there are now new processes being created.

Now the script is run on a busy system, that is creating many processes

(which happen to be short-lived),

# ./pidpersec.d

TIME LASTPID PID/s

2005 Jun 9 22:16:30 3051 13

2005 Jun 9 22:16:31 3063 12

2005 Jun 9 22:16:32 3073 10

2005 Jun 9 22:16:33 3084 11

2005 Jun 9 22:16:34 3096 12

^C

Now we can see that there are over 10 new processes created each second.

The value for lastpid confirms the rates printed.