Re: ps output format

[Randall R Schulz <rschulz at teknowledge dot com>]

TWIMC,

I have no idea what would be the implications of or requirements for 
implementing it under Cygwin, but the /proc file system is the way to 
free programs of parsing "ps" and related program output. Even though 
/proc doesn't solve the problem of standardizing the information 
content itself (since the contents of the files in /proc are 
system-specific and tend to change with new releases of the system 
that creates that data), but it does free programs from having to 
decode output that is intended primarily for human consumption as 
well as free them from having to run sub-processes to acquire that 
information.

Randall Schulz
Teknowledge Corp.
Palo Alto, CA USA


At 23:17 -0500 10/18/00, Chris Abbey wrote:
>At 23:51 10/18/00 -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>If you are aware of an existing ps implementation that does this,
>>though, I wouldn't mind a patch to have ps emulate it.  The ps code is
>>really pretty simple so it should not be hard to modify.
>
>there are none. any new format I came up with would be unique, and
>I'd have to hope the others would adopt it... some would (justifably)
>tell me to use their format specifier... but that just leads back to
>the same path because the format specifier isn't spec'd and so they
>all use subtly different options. I spent almost a month trying to
>port a really great script called top10vms so that it would run under:
>cygwin, aix, solaris, hp/ux, reliant, and linux. I eventually gave up
>even trying to get it to *work* on reliant and hp/ux, and the others
>were eventually done with the equivalent of #ifdefs. The net that I
>learned is that some platforms have RUN OUT of option letters for ps.
>The day I learned ps -a, ps -A, ps a, and ps A are all legal and
>completely different on the same box with the same binary is the
>day I lost it.



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