Comments on: man ps: OSX strikes back.

By: alex fairchild

alex fairchild — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:40:08 +0000

Da Man == James

thank you so much!

By: BoeroBoy

BoeroBoy — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:13:22 +0000

I’m having the same headaches here. ps isn’t the only inconsistency in OSX. Maybe this is partly why Apple is discontinuing it.

The man page also speaks of -u for showing user name instead of the much more useless user id. -u doesn’t work with ps on OSX, even when COMMAND_MODE=unix2003. And it seems there’s no way to show user name with ps in OSX …?

Our sys builders should have gone with Linux or waited another year until Apple discontinued the XServe.

By: Mike P

Mike P — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:04:56 +0000

Dude I love you guys! Thank you so much for figuring this out James I was cursing Apple like crazy for this :)

By: Pavel

Pavel — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:46:43 +0000

Wow! It works for me too! Thanks to Luigi (for raising the question) and to James (for answering it)!

By: Luigi

Luigi — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:58:27 +0000

Thanks James!

By: James Sadler

James Sadler — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:00:46 +0000

You can fix the ps -ef (illegal option) problem by ensuring that the environment variable COMMAND_MODE is set to unix2003

I have found that launching ps via iTerm would exhibit the problem but not when run via Terminal.app.

Set the environment variable in your bashrc or profile (or better yet, in the system-wide version in /etc).

I can’t help you with the man page inconsistencies, although it may be that the man pages are documenting the unix2003 behaviour, and all might be consistent when you try running those commands again with unix2003

Hope that helps.