UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm strugling with an expression for grep which I hope someone will be kind enough to help me with.
I'm attempting to isolate those processes which have run for more than a specified time (half a second at the moment). Script so far:

ps -ef | grep '[0-9]*:5[0-9]'

The issue is that it's picking up my session (wanted), but there is a STIME of HH:MM:SS listed. My script is returning those rows meeting the criteria above but applying it to the STIME column instead of the TIME column.
Is there an expression that will only look for **:** format and ignore **:**:** format?

Thanks in advance

You can choose which columns to be displayed by ps
For example,

Code:

ps -efo pid,time,cmd | grep '[0-9]*:5[0-9]'

See the man pages of ps to add other columns of your choice.

You may try this

Code:

ps -ef | grep ' [0-9]*:5[0-9] '

Note the whitespace within the expression.

Thanks for that Vino, I like the option to choose columns - that looks like it might be better than my solution after all.