I'm trying to create a script that allows me to determine all the pid's that spawned from an original process(ie - who's running this command)....

I've created a script that searches the processes running based on an argument passed the script. It then is to get the parent pid and look that up....It should recursively look up each subsequent parent pid until it can't find any....

I need to be able to pass a variable, parent pid, into a ps -f -p command, but it keeps failing.....

Help!! Any ideas??

Here is the script......

#!/bin/ksh
touch running.out
pid_file=pid_file.lst
ppid_file=ppid_file.lst
while [ -f running.out ]
do
echo "checking for $1 session"
ps -ef|grep $1|grep -v root|cut -f5 -d" " > $pid_file

if [ -s $pid_file ];
then
echo "$1 session found"
while read item;
do
echo "Looking for parent pid - $item"
ps -f -p$item|cut -f5 -d" " > $ppid_file
echo "$ppid_file"
while [ -s $ppid_file ]
do
while read item;
do
ps -f -p$item|cut -f5 -d" " > $ppid_file
echo "$ppid_file"
done < $ppid_file
done
done < $pid_file
else
echo "$1 session is not on the system"
rm running.out
fi

done
rm $pid_file
rm $$ppid_file

---- the error I'm getting is: ps --p needs an argument