Shell Programming and Scripting

now, when you run ps -ef, the very last field of the output contains the command. now, most of the time, these command are cut off and one can not see the complete name of the command that kicked off the process.

is there anyway to get this information? i mean, the complete command in its entirety. i hope i'm clear enough in my explanation. thanks

What OS are you using? On BSD, you can use the 'w' switch to get more of the command line, on Solaris, you can use /usr/ucb/ps with the 'w' switch as well. If you are on HP-UX, you might try using the 'l' (ell) switch, but that will also slice off part of the command line. In Linux, use the normal ps command without the '-' so that it will behave like the BSD ps (says so on the man page atleast).

we are using solaris and linux systems here.

thanks

If you are only interested in the command names only then you can also try

ps -ef | awk '{ print $8}'

regards
Apoorva Kumar