Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 9125
ps auxww does not guarantee widest
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:54 EDT
the man page for ps says that ww does not guarantee you the entire argv[0], breaking scripts which assume that, since every other unix implemented it that way. (if they have bsd ps at all, that is.) in fact, no amount of w's guarantee it, which seems pretty problematic/undesirable. thanks.
I've just tried this on Solaris, and discover that it rejects the command as being in error: Q> raven% ps auxww Q> usage: ps [ -aAdeflcjLPy ] [ -o format ] [ -t termlist ] Q> [ -u userlist ] [ -U userlist ] [ -G grouplist ] Q> [ -p proclist ] [ -g pgrplist ] [ -s sidlist ] Q> 'format' is one or more of: Q> user ruser group rgroup uid ruid gid rgid pid ppid pgid sid Q> pri opri pcpu pmem vsz rss osz nice class time etime stime Q> f s c lwp nlwp psr tty addr wchan fname comm args Q> raven% I would therefore have to assume that this bug report is faulty...
Solaris does not have a BSD-style ps command, except possibly in /usr/ucb.
"BSD-like" arguments in procps 2.0.x are retained primarily for compatibility with the old version of procps in which they were the only form of options, and so their semantics will not be changed. SysV options are the only options that are remotely close to portable between different versions of ps.
look, my original point has apparently been lost. nothing has been resolved. the point is, there should be a way to linux to show the process table with all arguments to the processes. according to the man page, you would have to give an infinite number of w's to ps to guarantee it. if there's another way to get the same effect, the man page should state it. however, i think it would be better for ww to have the effect.
I suspect that the manual might be wrong. I cannot confirm this because the source is rather dense, and it's not obvious where the "w" option is parsed. However, tests with RH6.2 show that "ww" will give as many lines of output as required. Compare the following: % sort /dev/zero `seq 1000` & ; ps aux % sort /dev/zero `seq 1000` & ; ps auxw % sort /dev/zero `seq 1000` & ; ps auxww (expect sort to crash with "memory exhausted")