Show full process name / path / string in Solaris using ps

Posted by David Yahalom under Solaris

Let’s say you have a JAVA process running on an old Sun Solaris machine. You want to see the full path of the process running including any run-time variables that were passed to it.

Using ps -eaf | grep -i java gives us this:

[root@hostname ~]# which ps
/bin/ps

[root@hostname ~]# ps -eaf | grep -i java

nobody  4589  4588   0 14:26:35 ?           0:21 /usr/java1.4/bin/java -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xms200m -Xmx300m org.apache.jse

As you can see the process name is trimmed and you can’t see all parameters passed to Java. No matter what parameters or scripting you’ll try and do, using /bin/ps (default) will crop your process name.

There is, however, an entriely different ps program we can use.

[root@hostname ~]#/usr/ucb/ps -auxwww | grep -i java

nobody    4589  0.1  4.228480842528 ?        S 14:26:35  0:21 /usr/java1.4/bin/java -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xms200m -Xmx300m org.apache.jserv.JServ /jserv/etc/jserv.properties

Fantastic!