XPG4 version of ps

[Norman Lowe]

The man page for the ps command includes information on an XPG4 version. This version doesn't seem to be on my system ,only the regular version in /usr/bin. How can the XPG version be installed?

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Have you tried the environment variable UNIX95?

# env UNIX95=1 ps ...

completely different behaviour of the same program

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Norman:

The XPG4 variations are armed by setting the UNIX95 variable. While you could set this and propagage (export) it to your running environment this my cause other standard commands (including 'ps') to behave unexpectedly when you run them. A better choice is to set the variable *only* for the duration of the command line. Consider:

# UNIX95= ps -e -o "user,vsz,pid,ppid,args"|sort -rnk

Note the blank (space) charater after the equal sign and before the 'ps' command. In this example you can obtain a list of processes by virtual size, sorted from largest to smallest.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Mark Henry_3]

Thanks guys.. this looks like the stuff..

Mark