UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I can write a script to use ps and interigate the output, but is there a command that works similar to the find command for files where I can request a list of all the running processes over 1 day old ?

thanks!

See if this appraoch helps - check the process

The situation is I have some processes that revert to uid 1 when they disconnect from the application. I can write a script that will awk out the uid, pid and time and kill anything that has reverted to uid 1. These hung processes also retain an application license until they die.

I know with the find command I can request a list of files over -mtime +n

I was just wondering if there was anyting that simple to tell me what process there are that are over "n" number of days old..

thanks!

Hmmm...that does not compute. You must mean that their parent dies and they become adopted by init. These processes have a ppid of 1. Easy to find those:

ps -ef | awk '$3 == 1'

As always use nawk instead of awk on Suns. The above code gives everything with a ppid of 1. You want only some of those. Maybe you can match something in the command line. Let's say all of the processes you want have abcxyz in the command line:

ps -ef | awk '$3 == 1 && $8 ~ "abcxyz"'

Now you should have a list of just the processes you want. Want just the pid's?

ps -ef | awk '$3 == 1 && $8 ~ "abcxyz" {print $2}'

Wanna kill 'em?

kill $(ps -ef | awk '$3 == 1 && $8 ~ "abcxyz" {print $2}')

Yes. sorry... ppid = 1.

The script will work, I was just wondering if there was a command that I didn't know about to get the age of a process....
thanks!

I don't understand how the process age fits into this problem. In general, no, it is hard to get the age of a process. The tools mostly display start time. So you need to do calculations. I believe that you use SunOS, though. Bear in mind that on a Sun, you can using the find command on processes by using /proc. Each process gets a subdirectory. So as root you can do:
cd /proc
find . ! -name . -prune -mtime +3 -print | xargs ls -ld
or something like that.

I forgot about the /proc directory. I can incorporate that into my logic. thanks!

Why I want to know the age is that I try to give these processes time to clean themselves up just incase they are still processing something even though they are no longer connected to the application.