The meaning of “1-” in the output of ps

This is the output of the command ps -ef | grep java on one of our machines.

jboss     1965  1935  1  2013 ?        04:41:05 java XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX  
jboss     2170  2141  0  2013 ?        00:42:57 java XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
jboss     2708  2679  7  2013 ?        1-04:38:51 java XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
tomcat    6845     1  1  2013 ?        03:28:03 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
jboss    24651 24622  0  2013 ?        03:03:27 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
tomcat   32533     1  0  2013 ?        00:12:08 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

(XXXs added to hide the guilty!)

What is the meaning of the 1- on the third line?

Best Answer

That means one day + 4:38 hours of cumulative CPU time that has been used by this process.

Example

It's helpful to look at the column headers to understand the values.

$ ps -ef | head -5
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root         1     0  0  2013 ?        00:00:01 /sbin/init
root         2     0  0  2013 ?        00:00:00 [kthreadd]
root         3     2  0  2013 ?        00:00:00 [migration/0]
root         4     2  0  2013 ?        00:00:10 [ksoftirqd/0]

This bit from the ps man page explains the time format for that column.

By default, ps selects all processes with the same effective user ID 
(euid=EUID) as the current user and associated with the same terminal as 
the invoker.  It displays the process ID (pid=PID), the terminal 
associated with the process (tname=TTY), the cumulated CPU time in 
[DD-]hh:mm:ss format (time=TIME), and the executable name (ucmd=CMD).  
Output is unsorted by default.

The bit you're asking about is this:

[DD-]hh:mm:ss format (time=TIME)

The DD- is the 1- so they're days.

Related Solutions

Linux – Piping PS output into a Text file

You can control the columns that get output by ps. Note that the exact commandline does vary between the various flavours of Linux/Unix but I believe the following will do what you want.

ps --no-headers -o pid,comm  -C "ProgramXX" >> Data.txt

The man page for ps(1) will list all of the options available to you.

Shell – Extract tomcat parameters from ps output

Pass the -o option to ps to control which fields it outputs. If you add an = sign after all the fields, then the header line is omitted.

Use -e instead of ax to stick to standard features (this will work on any non-antique unix).

Your filter with grep is not robust. For example, if you run this command from a script called look-for-tomcat, then your script would be matched as well. Here's a more robust way that looks for a JVM process with org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap as an argument.

ps -e -o user=,args= | awk '
    $2 ~ /java$/ &&  / org\.apache\.catalina\.startup\.Bootstrap($| ) {
        print "user name: ", $1;
        if (match($0, / -javaagent:[^ ]* /)) print substr($0, RSTART+1, RSTART+RLENGTH-2);
        # etc.
    }'

Even better would be to log the PID of the tomcat process in a file (e.g. /var/run/tomcat.pid) when it starts.

Best Answer

Example

Related Solutions

Linux – Piping PS output into a Text file

Shell – Extract tomcat parameters from ps output

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