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.