Solaris – Fixing ‘ps’ Command Not Giving Output in Home Directory

pathpssolaris

I am logging into a solaris server, switching to bash, then switching to another user "sruser" and switching to bash.

/home/batch/sruser/ is the home directory of the user "sruser".

The issue is ps is not giving any output when run in the home directory –

# pwd
 /home/batch/sruser/
# ps
# cd dir1
 /home/batch/sruser/dir1
# ps 
   PID TTY      TIME CMD
 17867 pts/1789 0:00 bash
 17165 pts/1789 0:00 ksh
 20435 pts/1789 0:00 ps
#

Don't know what could be the issue. Don't even know where to start looking for whatever could be the issue.

Best Answer

$PATH has .(cwd) and there is a file ps with executable permissions in the home directory.

# ls -lrt *ps*
-rwxrw-r--   1 sruser  batch          0 Jun 2 2010 ps
# type ps
ps is hashed (./ps)
# which ps
./ps

Hence the command was not giving any output.

Related Solutions

Bash – How to get the tty in which bash is running

Simply by typing tty:

$ tty 
/dev/pts/20

Too simple and obvious to be true :)

Edit: The first one returns you also the pty of the process running grep as you can notice:

$ ps ax | grep $$
28295 pts/20   Ss     0:00 /bin/bash
29786 pts/20   S+     0:00 grep --color=auto 28295

therefore you would need to filter out the grep to get only one result, which is getting ugly:

ps ax | grep $$ | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }'

or using

ps ax | grep "^$$" | awk '{ print $2 }'

(a more sane variant)

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