Thank you guys! you're all best!

i'm trying to make this script to work on both Linux and SunOS, is there a different command that i could use in place of ps that would do the same thing? Like you said SunOS won't allow ps gu...

The command "ps -ef" says to return extended information information on ALL processes. This sould work on any flavor of unix

Thanks for your reply, but "ps -ef" does not give me %CPU, Start time, State....etc or the process.

Try this one on your system.

ps -e -o user,pid,ppid,pcpu,stime,etime,time,comm

when i pipe this command to grep for a $user, the header get cut off. how do i fix that?

This command does the same thing, the head gets cut off. without the grep for user then the head displays...

Try

ps -e -o pid,pcpu,comm|head -n1;ps -e -o pid,pcpu,comm|tail +2|grep "${user}"