ps aux for long charactered usernames shows a plus sign

Question

I'm trying to get an output from ps aux so that it looks like:

giovanni     28331  4381  0 15:43 ?       00:00:00 sshd: giovanni@pts/1
giovanni     28346 28331  0 15:43 pts/1   00:00:00 -bash
giovanni     28646 28346  0 15:43 pts/1   00:00:00 ./example.sh

However, running this command on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, gives the following instead:

giovan+     28331  4381  0 15:43 ?       00:00:00 sshd: giovanni@pts/1
giovan+     28346 28331  0 15:43 pts/1   00:00:00 -bash
giovan+     28646 28346  0 15:43 pts/1   00:00:00 ./example.sh

So how can I remove these plus signs and instruct the command to show me the whole username instead?

That's interesting, my username is the same length and isn't truncated — Jamie, Sep 13 '14 at 22:18
Yes interesting indeed. Using Red Hat Linux, the ps output only shows 6 characters and the + sign to indicate that it is clipped. I had read elsewhere that the ps output was supposed to have up to 8 characters, but it isn't consistent across distributions. — shawn1874, Jul 29 '22 at 18:31

score 38 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 16 '19 at 15:31

According to man ps, ps -aux is "To see every process on the system using standard (UNIX) syntax". I found no way to set a user-defined format to display the output.

In BSD syntax however, you can set the width of the column like: user:<width>. The following should give you the same information, setting the username column width to 20 (or any other value):

ps axo user:20,pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,rss,tty,stat,start,time,comm

output with (very) long name:

USER                   PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TT       STAT  STARTED     TIME COMMAND

.........................................................................................

root                  3826  0.0  0.1  77828  4788 ?        Ss   08:15:55 00:00:00 cupsd
lp                    3831  0.0  0.0  63156  2224 ?        S    08:15:56 00:00:00 dbus
lp                    3832  0.0  0.0  63156  2220 ?        S    08:15:56 00:00:00 dbus
root                  4822  1.7  5.1 446964 210416 tty8    Ss+  08:38:00 00:03:27 Xorg
root                  4923  0.0  0.1 174652  4412 ?        Sl   08:38:02 00:00:00 lightdm
tantemarievanhier     5181  0.0  0.1 544216  4796 ?        Sl   08:38:08 00:00:00 gnome-keyring-d
tantemarievanhier     5228  0.0  0.0  40492  2740 ?        Ss   08:38:08 00:00:00 init
tantemarievanhier     5369  0.0  0.0  41816  3064 ?        Ss   08:38:09 00:00:02 dbus-daemon
tantemarievanhier     5376  0.0  0.0  10616   316 ?        Ss   08:38:09 00:00:00 ssh-agent

setting column width to 7:

ps axo user:7,pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,rss,tty,stat,start,time,comm

USER     PID  %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TT       STAT  STARTED     TIME COMMAND

.........................................................................................

tantem+  6623  0.0  0.0 287228  3820 ?        Sl   08:39:00 00:00:00 unity-webapps-s
tantem+  6679  0.0  0.4 676856 18640 ?        Sl   08:39:20 00:00:00 update-notifier
tantem+  6721  0.0  0.1 541224  7056 ?        Sl   08:40:20 00:00:00 deja-dup-monito
tantem+  6743  0.0  0.5 810616 21888 ?        Sl   08:41:55 00:00:00 unity-scope-hom
tantem+  6758  0.0  0.2 717256 10352 ?        Sl   08:41:55 00:00:00 unity-files-dae
tantem+  6760  0.0  0.5 607208 22920 ?        Sl   08:41:55 00:00:00 unity-scope-loa
tantem+  6784  0.0  0.2 350676  9060 ?        Sl   08:41:56 00:00:00 unity-music-dae

For convenience reasons, you could add the following line to ~/.bashrc:

alias psaux='ps axo user:20,pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,rss,tty,stat,start,time,comm'

so that ps aux is the "normal" output, while psaux gives you the full name- version.

Note:

You can also show the full name by moving the name column to the last position:

ps axo pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,rss,tty,stat,start,time,comm,user

gives:

 PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TT       STAT  STARTED     TIME COMMAND         USER


 5181  0.0  0.1 544216  4548 ?        Sl   08:38:08 00:00:00 gnome-keyring-d tantemarievanhier
 5228  0.0  0.0  40492  2668 ?        Ss   08:38:08 00:00:00 init            tantemarievanhier
 5369  0.0  0.0  41816  3032 ?        Ss   08:38:09 00:00:07 dbus-daemon     tantemarievanhier

How to display the output, setting the width of the USER column automatically

There is another, more refined way to set the width of the USER- column. If we run the command with a very high value for the USER column width, we can use a small script to rearrange the lines, adjusting the column width to the longest user name.

To do so

Copy the script below, paste it into an empty file, save it as psaux_alternative.py.
Make it executable

Add a line to your ~/.bashrc:

alias psaux='/path/to/psaux_alternative.py`

Then, running psaux in a terminal window will display the output with an automatic width of the USER column.

The script:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import subprocess

command = "ps axo user:30,pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,rss,tty,stat,start,time,comm"
l = subprocess.check_output(["/bin/bash", "-c", command]).decode("utf-8").split("\n")
minlen = sorted(set([30-len(item.split(" ")[0]) for item in l]))[0]
for line in l:
    print(line[:30-minlen]+line[30:])

This is a very nice workaround, thank you very much Jacob! However, do you think there's a proper way to do this? I mean what we just did was increasing the column width, but is there no way to let Ubuntu automatically increase this width according to the largest username length? — Giovanni Mounir, Sep 14 '14 at 21:19
@GiovanniMounir now that is an interesting question! And yes, that should be possible. I'll get back to it tomorrow or day after tomorrow at latest. — Jacob Vlijm, Sep 14 '14 at 21:22
@GiovanniMounir I made a small script to do the job. Running it will display the output width automatic width of the USER column. — Jacob Vlijm, Sep 15 '14 at 08:15
@JacobVlijm Very nice one! I'm once again impressed by your scripts for every purpose... ;D — Byte Commander, Mar 26 '15 at 15:15
This is nice, however the "comm" column does not show the actual full path and command being run as -axu shows. How can I see the exact same "COMMAND" column output that -aux shows? — Dave, Mar 18 '22 at 13:42

furibund · Answer 2 · 2015-03-26T13:28:51.360

3

I encountered the same problem. The ps manual tells us about WIDE-WCHAN-COLUMN. A smart try with parallel formed WIDE-RUSER-COLUMN ended in the wanted result:

$ ps -e -o ruser=WIDE-RUSER-COLUMN

edited Mar 26 '15 at 13:28

answered Mar 26 '15 at 12:49

furibund

41
2

Could you please add some context in your answer that explain the command? welcome and thanks – αғsнιη Mar 26 '15 at 12:52
@KasiyA It has been edited. – Byte Commander Mar 26 '15 at 14:34
@ByteCommander I see. BTW, I'm not the person who downvoted :( +1 for him. – αғsнιη Mar 26 '15 at 14:44
1

More useful with the capital-O option, which includes all the default columns: `ps -e -O ruser=WIDE-RUSER-COLUMN` – tanius Oct 17 '21 at 21:33
This came close to working for me. However it still doesn't show the full username in some cases. I encountered a username with about 19 characters and it was still clipped using this option. Still, I appreciate the idea of trying it this way. In my case it was also on RHEL7 that it happened so maybe this does work on ubuntu. – shawn1874 Aug 05 '22 at 19:35

ps aux for long charactered usernames shows a plus sign

2 Answers2

Note:

How to display the output, setting the width of the USER column automatically