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knorv
Asked: 2009-09-05 00:15:15 +0800 CST

Getting full path of executables in 'ps auxwww' output

  • 772

Consider the following lines from a "ps auxwww" output:

USER       PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
root      4262   0.0  0,1    76592   1104 s005  Ss   10:02am   0:00.03 login -pf yo
yo        4263   0.0  0,0    75964    956 s005  S    10:02am   0:00.03 -bash

How do I force ps to expand all commands in the COMMAND column to their fully qualified path names? I want login to be resolved to /usr/bin/login and Bash to /bin/bash.

Is there an equivalent to procfs in Mac OS X? That is - is there a file-based mechanism to easily obtain process information?

mac-osx unix process ps

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try this instead:

    ps ax -o pid,cmd

    You can reformat it as you wish (read the man page for details).

    Finally, I think that ps (and even cat /proc/*/cmdline) will report the command the way it was launched. So if no full path was given, it will appear as just "command" instead of "/path/to/command".

    • 8

  2. Firstly, processes can change the title reported by ps, so it's not very reliable in itself. You could try the environment variables using the 'e' flag.

    ps auxwwwe

    Within these should be a builtin '_' variable as described here.

    For every command that is run as a child of the shell, sh sets this variable to the full path name of the executable file and passes this value through the environment to that child process.

    This holds true for sh on BSD as it does Linux. I believe that this can't overwritten by the user. However, its availability may depend on the user's choice of shell, it's pretty nasty and your mileage may vary.

    OS X doesn't have a native procfs. There is a port based upon FUSE. Details can be found here. Again, your mileage may vary.

    • 6

  3. Stop messing around with ps and use cat /proc/pid/cmdline .

    You can use wildcards such as /proc/*/cmdline .

    • -1

  4. Extract all process ids and full path from /proc:

    ls -l /proc/*/exe 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $8 " " $10}'
    • -1