Can I use ps to identify processes more than 30 days old?

[Preet Dhillon]

I'd like to kill all processes owned by the 'lp' user which are more than 30 days old. I can get a list of these processes using 'ps -f -u lp' but I don't know how to compare the date in the output with the current date to identify which are more than 30 days old. Can anyone help ? Many thanks in advance.

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,
'ps' displays the starting date of a process if its older than 24 hours. So at the end of the month you could select the processes of the previous month and kill them.

good luck,
Thierry.

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

here a quick and dirty script to do this.
(i used the touch command to have a file for every process with the same time as the pid and use find to get the older ones).

#!/bin/sh

LANG=C # set default language

mkdir -p /var/tmp/pstmp 2>&- # create temp dir
rm -f /var/tmp/pstmp/* # purge temp dir

cd /var/tmp/pstmp || exit 1

# i've added grep -v lpsched to prevent stopping the scheduler at all
ps -fulp|grep -v lpsched|awk '{
month=0;
if($5 == "Jan") month=1;
if($5 == "Feb") month=2;
if($5 == "Mar") month=3;
if($5 == "Apr") month=4;
if($5 == "May") month=5;
if($5 == "Jun") month=6;
if($5 == "Jul") month=7;
if($5 == "Aug") month=8;
if($5 == "Sep") month=9;
if($5 == "Oct") month=10;
if($5 == "Nov") month=11;
if($5 == "Dec") month=12;
if(month > 0)
printf("%s %02d%02d0000\n",$2,month,$6);
}' |while read pid stamp
do
touch -t $stamp $pid # touch a reference file for every pid
done
find [0-9]* -mtime +30 2>&-|while read pid # find files older than 30 days
do
kill $pid # kill it
done
cd /
rm -rf /var/tmp/pstmp # cleanup

Regards

[John Palmer]

How about a monthly reboot?

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

you might want to look at the output of
lpstat -t and cancel using the cancel command the job number.. that's assuming the lp user is doing lp print commands.

Later,
bill

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

ps -ef|grep -i "Mar 1"|grep -i lp