Shell Programming and Scripting

This is NOT the input to the desired post processing! And so does NOT explain what output you are getting. We can only guess from what RESULTS you post what went into e.g. the printf command.

WHAT is the output of e.g. ps axo cmd= --sort=-%cpu, serving as the input? Using former on my system will yield a very different result that on yours, so I can't compare.

A simple ps (by Yoda) and sort should fill your requirement :

Code:

ps -eo "%c,%U,%C,%n" | sort -t"," -n -k 3,3

Change the values you want from ps, delimited by comma for additional info.

sort is what you want, not awk(s) and gnu sort extensions.
Check out sort examples, it's a powerful tool.

Regards
Peasant.

the output for

Code:

ps axo cmd= --sort=-%cpu

is:

Code:

/init
/bin/bash
ps axo cmd= --sort=-%cpu

and for user:

Code:

root
Eskizoide
Eskizoide

And when i do printf it just prints everything on one column.
Thank you for your patience.

That only seems to be one single column as, be it variables or substitutions, contain line feeds that fold the output back to the next line. In fact, printf will see only two items (with many lines and words each) that consume only the first two format specifiers "%10s %25s.

in fact it doesnt consume any format from printf because printf doesnt detect what i give him like a string.

neither this:

Code:

STRING=$(ps axo cmd= --sort=-%cpu)
printf "%20s\n" "$STRING"

A bit difficult to believe. For me it prints pages full of commands and their parameters.

man printf: Try to limit the field width like %20.20s.
What's your OS and shell versions?

RudiC, thank you for your help, but i decided to take a different aproach to the problem and i think i've solved. Instead of printing lists into the table, i sorted processes and show only the pid, now with a for loop, i take each pid and show the attribute that i need for that pid. So instead of printing a list of all processes, im inserting each one with a loop, that way i dont have problems with printf recognizing a string.