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ps clarification | December 17, 2007

I just received my author copies of the book and discovered the first issue. In chapter 18, page 302 where I write about the ps command I write:

“The most common options are -a, -u, and -x (so common, in fact, that you can issue them without the -).”

This is actually no longer exactly true. The latest version of Leopard has changed the ps command and the -u option now is a switch to select the processes of a specific user ID (though the man page is a bit unclear about this, and the command doesn’t seem to work as expected).

That said, the command used in the book ( “ps aux” ) still functions as expected (do to some compatibility magic), however if you use “ps -aux” you will get an error. The proper new way to get the expected results would be to use “ps -ajx” .

Also, it seems for the moment neither the -u or -U options (the -U option is covered on page 303) work as they should at all. I assume this will be fixed with an update, but who knows

It seems the -u and -U options do work however if you use them with the -a (or -A) options, then they (-a or -A) will take precedence. So, rather then “ps aux -U user” (as I used as an example in my book) you can use “ps -jxU user” instead.

My Book is at the Printer! | November 20, 2007

Last week I was out in San Francisco for Oracle Open World (which was really quite interesting… Oracle seems IMO to be way ahead of everyone else in the whole enterprise software space). Anyway while I was out there I spent quite a bit of time at Apress in Berkeley and was there as they put the finishing touches on my book and shipped it off to the printer. All this means that it should be on bookshelves all over in about another month (Officially December 17th). Of course you can pre-order it now if you’d like <g>.