How to get only the user, the pid and the command run for a specific process? (Ubuntu 11.10)

Question

When I do ps -ef|grep python I get the following:

myusername  4492  2994  0 10:32 pts/0    00:00:01 /home/myusername/.virtualenvs/myproject/bin/ipython manage.py runserver
root        6665     1  0 10:42 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/system-service/system-service-d
myusername 14051 13497  0 11:28 pts/7    00:00:00 grep --color=auto python

How do I get only the user who is running the process, the pid and the command run for the process as in the following output instead?

myusername  4492 /home/myusername/.virtualenvs/myproject/bin/ipython manage.py runserver
root        6665 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/system-service/system-service-d

Answer 1

I guess you are looking for the -o argument:

-o format:

user-defined format. format is a single argument in the form of a blank-separated or comma-separated list, which offers a way to specify individual output columns. The recognized keywords are described in the STANDARD FORMAT SPECIFIERS section below. Headers may be renamed (ps -o pid,ruser=RealUser -o comm=Command) as desired. If all column headers are empty (ps -o pid= -o comm=) then the header line will not be output. Column width will increase as needed for wide headers; this may be used to widen up columns such as WCHAN (ps -o pid,wchan=WIDE-WCHAN-COLUMN -o comm). Explicit width control (ps opid,wchan:42,cmd) is offered too. The behavior of ps -o pid=X,comm=Y varies with personality; output may be one column named "X,comm=Y" or two columns named "X" and "Y". Use multiple -o options when in doubt. Use the PS_FORMAT environment variable to specify a default as desired; DefSysV and DefBSD are macros that may be used to choose the default UNIX or BSD columns.

So the command you want would be (Ubuntu):

ps -o uid,pid,cmd -ef|grep python

under OpenSolaris the command is:

ps -o ruser,pid,comm -ef|grep python

Answer 2

The simplest would probably be:

$ ps o uid=,pid=,cmd= -C python
1000 26126 python

That way you get everything directly from ps and don't need to parse anything.

From the ps man page:

-o format

User-defined format. format is a single argument in the form of a blank-separated or comma-separated list, which offers a way to specify individual output columns. [...] Headers may be renamed (ps -o pid,ruser=RealUser -o comm=Command) as desired. If all column headers are empty (ps -o pid= -o comm=) then the header line will not be output.

-C cmdlist
     Select by command name.  This selects the processes whose executable 
     name is given in cmdlist.

The -C option will work if you are running python interactively, not if python is running a script. In that case you should use -C scriptname.py instead.

Answer 3

ps -eo user,pid,cmd | grep [p]ython

Example:

$ ps -eo user,pid,cmd | grep [p]ython
root      1056 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/networkd-dispatcher --run-startup-triggers
root      1735 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/fail2ban-server -xf start
user     16613 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/share/system-config-printer/applet.py

Explanation:

• -e all processes
• -o user-defined format
• user,pid,cmd Show user, process ID, command columns

Note: if you use -f with -o as others have suggested, you may get errors. This is because both of these parameters control the output format, and only one of them should be used:

$ ps --help | grep -A 2 "output format"
*********** output format **********
-o,o user-defined  -f full
-j,j job control   s  signal

Answer 4

My version of PS is different, so it might require some tweaking, but you can use cut (and possibly tr depending on what you are trying to achieve) - for example something like

ps ef | cut -c1-16,50-   

Will provide the characters 1-16 and 50 onwards from each line of your ps statement. (Your actual numbers will probably need a bit of massaging).

Another way to do it (but you will loose formatting) might be

ps ef | tr -s " " | cut -f1,2,8- -d" "

Which will compress the whitespace in the ps command, then take fields 1,2 and 8 onwards and display them.