By William Sescu
Have your ever faced such a situation. You have usernames in your /etc/passwd file with more than 8 characters. This is no problem for Linux at all, usernames may be up to 32 characters long, only your ps output might look a little scrambled.
It shows you the uid instead of the username like in the following example:
$ id uid=20001(longuser01) gid=10002(oinstall) groups=10002(oinstall) $ sleep 1000000 & $ ps -ef | grep sleep | grep -v grep 20001 14069 11739 0 14:11 pts/0 00:00:00 sleep 1000000
But you want to see the username instead of the uid. The workaround is
- Don’t use more than eight characters for your usernames 🙂
- Or …. format your ps output the right way
You could use the following alias to get the job done.
$ alias psx='export PS_FORMAT="user:12,pid,%cpu,%mem,vsz,rss,tty,stat,start,time,command"; ps ax' $ psx | grep sleep | grep -v grep longuser01 14069 0.0 58940 520 pts/0 S 14:11:50 sleep 1000000
Now it looks better.
Cheers, William