[lug] Strange ps behaviour?

[Justin-lists]

Well, I thought I had this problem with a certain user for the longest time. I think today I found out that it really isn't a problem but how the ps command outputs info. The problem was, whenever I did a "ps aux", any process running under this users id would should up with the uid in the  USER field instead of the username. I never could figure out why it was happening, it didn't make sense. But the user said he never had any problems so I didn't worry about it :P

Well, today I noticed the same problem with a user I just added yesterday. I instantly noticed a correlation between the two users that have this "problem". They both have long usernames (9 letters). So, it appears that it is just a display issue with ps, I guess it won't display usernames up to a certain character amount. It simply just uses the uid in it's place. That is my assumption anyways. I did a test and made a user with 8 letters in it's username and it showed up fine. Then made another test user with 9 letters for the username and sure enough, the uid showed up under a ps output instead of the name, weird...Anyone else experience this? Or did I just stumble upon a normal "feature" in ps? :)

Justin


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