List usernames instead of uids with the ps command for long usernames

Article Number: 328 | Rating: Unrated | Last Updated: Wed, Jul 25, 2018 1:53 PM

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