Getting around truncated “ps”

Question

I'm trying to write a script that will find a particular process based on a keyword, extract the PID, then kill it using the found PID.

The problem I'm having in Solaris is that, because the "ps" results are truncated, the search based on the keyword won't work because the keyword is part of the section (past 80 characters) that is truncated.

I read that you can use "/usr/ucb/ps awwx" to get something more than 80 characters, but as of Solaris 10, this needs to be run from root, and I can't avoid that restriction in my script.

Does anyone have any suggestions for getting that PID? The first 80 characters are too generic to search for (part of a java command).

Thanks.

Answer 1

You assumption about ps behavior is incorrect. Even while you aren't logged as root, "/usr/ucb/ps -ww" doesn't truncate arguments for processes you own, i.e. for processes you can kill which are the only one you are interested in.

$ cat /etc/release
                    Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 s10x_u9wos_14a X86
     Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
                            Assembled 11 August 2010
$ id
uid=1000(jlliagre) gid=1000(jlliagre)
$ /usr/ucb/ps | grep abc
  2035 pts/3    S  0:00 /bin/ksh ./abc aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbb
$ /usr/ucb/ps -ww | grep abc
  2035 pts/3    S  0:00 /bin/ksh ./abc aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

Answer 2

This works for me, at least on Joyent SmartMachine:

/usr/ucb/ps auxwwww

Answer 3

I would suggest pgrep and pkill - http://www.opensolarisforum.org/man/man1/pkill.html - instead.

Edit 0:

How about this ugly procfs hack instead:

~$ for f in /proc/[0-9]*/cmdline; do if grep -q --binary-files=text KEYWORD $f; \
 > then l=`dirname $f`;p=`basename $l`; echo "killing $p"; kill $p; fi; done

I'm sure there's a shorter incantation for this but my shell-fu is a bit rusty.
Disclaimers: only tested in bash on Linux, would probably match itself too.

Answer 4

pargs will help here. though you'll have to iterate through all of the running procs which is a little annoying. but this will at least show you all of a procs arguments when ps would truncate them.

user@machine:(/home/user)> pargs 23097
23097:  /usr/bin/bash ./test.sh aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbb
argv[0]: /usr/bin/bash
argv[1]: ./test.sh
argv[2]: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
argv[3]: bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
argv[4]: ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc

Answer 5

I don't remember exactly about solaris and i don't have an access to it now, only tomorrow, but in any case it's better to order the fields you want — simplifies parsing.

ps -o pid,args

If the output is truncated, maybe setting the column name to long string shall help.

Answer 6

/usr/ucb/ps -auxww | grep <processname> or <PID>

Answer 7

Use the -w option (twice for unlimited width):

$ ps -w -w -A -o pid,cmd