I understand that the ps -ax would have spawned at least one more process (and a header) than the sysctl count, but I'm not seeing why sysctl is showing 11 more processes than ps does: $ sysctl kern.nprocs && (ps -ax |wc -l) && sysctl kern.nprocs kern.nprocs=46 35 kern.nprocs=46
This machine has been up a while and has had enough various errors to make the boot dmesg disappear from logs, so here's the various kern.* sysctl's that show what kernel I'm running: kern.ostype=OpenBSD kern.osrelease=3.8 kern.osrevision=200511 kern.version=OpenBSD 3.8-current (GENERIC) #320: Sat Dec 17 10:09:10 MST 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC A 3.9 system is a tad different, but exhibits the same strangeness: $ sysctl kern.nprocs && (ps -ax |wc -l) && sysctl kern.nprocs kern.nprocs=48 39 kern.nprocs=48 Any idea where the discrepancy might be coming from? --Bill