So, I’m stumped – maybe someone knows the answer to this one. I noticed that on my new Ubuntu system, if I ran ps every 5 seconds or so, the process number jumped significantly, by 5 or 6. Being a bit of a control freak, I want to know exactly what’s creating those processes, so I wrote a little Tcl script to try and catch any new [0-9]* directories in proc and read its cmdline file entry, but that seems to not be fast enough to catch the culprit in the act. I had a look at inotify, but that doesn’t seem to work with /proc. So at this point, I’m stumped, and am looking around for suggestions. I just want to have a record of newly created processes… seems like it ought to be possible.