Shell Programming and Scripting

I agree that randomly killing the top 5 "user" memory processes is not sensible.

On HP-UX you need to work from ps -al.

Assuming ksh .

To get you started. Execute the "ps" command, exclude the heading line containing "PID", sort numerical reversed by size, extract the top 5, extract the fields for PID and SIZE.

Code:

ps -al | grep -v "PID" | sort +9 -r | head -5 | awk '{print $4,$10}' | while read PID SIZE
do
    echo "${PID} ${SIZE}"
done

If the SIZE figures seem small it is because it is in 4k pages.

(On some HP-UX versions the Berkeley unix syntax ps aux is available by invoking UNIX95 mode within the Shell).

ps -al excludes process group leaders, while ps -el lists all processes.

Code:

ps -el | tail +2 | sort -k 10nr | awk '{print $4,$10} NR==5{exit}'

On HP-UX the UNIX95 environment variable enables Posix mode (not BSD mode)
Posix has the nice -o format option:

Code:

UNIX95=1 ps -e -o pid= -o sz= | sort -k 2nr | head -5

can u check this for process pid listing

Code:

ps -eo %mem,pid  | sort -n -k 1  | grep -iv mem | tail -5 | awk '{ print $1 }'