[lug] Strange ps behaviour?

[Harris, James]

My best guess would be that this is a hold-over from the days of old when
most *nix's didn't support more than 8 characters in a login name.  They've
probably kept the field width so that legacy scripts don't croak, etc...
etc...

That'd be my guess... :)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hugh Brown [mailto:hugh at vecna.com] 
> Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 5:18 PM
> To: LUG
> Subject: Re: [lug] Strange ps behaviour?
> 
> 
> I have had the same experience with this "feature".
> 
> Hugh
> 
> On Wed, 2002-08-14 at 11:18, Justin-lists wrote:
> > 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
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > glow at jackmoves.com
> > 
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