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Can someone please enlighten on what the difference is when passing the 'j' and '-l -y' options to the 'ps' utility.

An other good 'ps' resource is welcome too.

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  • I think this post answers my question better, sorry for ambiguity. serverfault.com/questions/95171/options-of-the-ps-utility
    – Sawan
    Dec 18, 2009 at 2:01
  • I understand you asked this quite some time ago, but just for future reference, please do not cross-post questions on multiple Stack Exchange sites. Thanks.
    – nhinkle
    Aug 12, 2012 at 5:06

1 Answer 1

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The ultimate resource would be the ps man page. You can access this from your terminal as well by typing man ps.

As for the options:

-j     jobs format
-l      long format
-y      Do not show flags; show rss in place of addr. This option can
        only be used with -l.

output of each switch (other combinations are possible):

[john@awesome]$ps -j
PID  PGID   SID TTY          TIME CMD
30693 30693 30693 pts/1    00:00:00 bash
30879 30879 30693 pts/1    00:00:00 ps

[john@awesome]$ps -l
F S   UID   PID  PPID  C PRI  NI ADDR SZ WCHAN  TTY          TIME CMD
0 S  1089 30693 30691  0  78   3 -  1166 wait   pts/1    00:00:00 bash
0 R  1089 30882 30693  0  80   3 -  1052 -      pts/1    00:00:00 ps

[john@awesome]$ps -ly
S   UID   PID  PPID  C PRI  NI   RSS    SZ WCHAN  TTY          TIME CMD
S  1089 30693 30691  0  78   3  1488  1166 wait   pts/1    00:00:00 bash
R  1089 30890 30693  0  80   3   820  1052 -      pts/1    00:00:00 ps

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