The one and only way

I am telling you, sometimes I think all we Linux/UNIX/*BSD/whatever derivative of UNIX enthusiasts really deserve the position that our favourite OS holds in this world – second to MS Windows ! I mean, consider what happened to me just now :

I was working on this Solaris machine for my lab assignment in the CS 562 class and all I want to do is see all the processes running on the machine. Coming from the Linux world, I did a ‘ps aux’ hoping to see the familiar multi-column output. Instead ps sticks its tongue out at me and asks me to familiarize myself with the way of learning to respect it – through its myriad of command-line options. Finally after fighting long enough, I found that to get a three column output of all processes listing the owner, PID and name, I have to do :

ps -A -o user,fname,pid

Aaaaah ! Why can’t things just be standardized ? I thought POSIX was supposed to take care of stuff like this !

Heck, one of these days I am going to decide I have had enough of all this geek stuff and just get myself a Mac or better still, a Windows box :-)

[Apologies to all the non-geeks out there (hey nOnda!) for the highly technical content of this post.]

Post Author

This post was written by Ravi who has written 134 posts on Things Ravi Pratap Is Up To.

View Comments to “The one and only way”

  1. sush 04. Mar, 2003 at 1:45 AM #

    I quite agree. A lot of standardization needs to happen. I can’t even get used to shifting between office(FreeBSD 4.4) and home(Slackware Linux 8.1).

    I use “ps -ax -ww” in BSD, and -ww gives a problem under linux.

    Or “su -l sushanth” vs. “su – sushanth”. Madness

    Heck, the options for things like bzip2-ing a file after tar-ing, the cmdline options are different between Redhat/SuSe/Slackware…

    BTW, your syndication link : “http://www.rpmduplex.net/ravi/index.rdf“ is dead.

  2. Ravi 04. Mar, 2003 at 10:10 AM #

    Woah, syndication is dead ?!?! Lemme see what got into MovableType :-)

    Thanks for the info.

  3. Ravi 04. Mar, 2003 at 10:13 AM #

    Okay, syndication link fixed !

  4. sush 04. Mar, 2003 at 2:47 PM #

    Nopes, don’t see the file. BTW, that feed is being fed into LJ as http://www.livejournal.com/users/ravi_pratap/

  5. Ravi 04. Mar, 2003 at 3:46 PM #

    Okay I figured out the problem. You were using http://www.rpmduplex.net/ravi/activity.html to get to this site when it simply is a symlink to ~ravi/myblog :-)

    I am going to fix this by putting in a redirect page. Please use ~ravi/myblog to get to this blog.

    Hey what’s this ravi_pratap this on LJ ? Did you just create it or what ? Can I login and use it and stuff ?

    /me is excited.

  6. sush 05. Mar, 2003 at 8:47 AM #

    Gotcha. Your “Syndicate my bog” link was off. Now its fine, I’ll just create another feed over at LJ pointing to the new link.

    Heh. Sorry, the ravi_pratap over at LJ isn’t something you can use to log in. Kalyan created that. It is simply a place holder feed that feeds off the rdf file you export. Essentially, we, at LJ can add that to our friends’ list, and when you update, we get your entry as if an LJ user by the name of ravi_pratap had made an entry. Its an automated feed that depends on your RDF, not a login.

    Easy enough for us to create an account for you though. Ravikant Rao should have quite a few spare codes.

  7. Ravi 05. Mar, 2003 at 11:52 AM #

    Okay I figured it was placeholder feed :-) The syndication info seems to be wrong. It points to ~ravi/index.rdf which is wrong. It should be ~ravi/myblog/index.rdf

    Can you fix that please ?

    So you are Khorgath eh ? :-)

  8. sush 05. Mar, 2003 at 2:25 PM #

    Done. Now syndicated at http://www.livejournal.com/users/ravipratap/

    The other one will go down after kallu unsubscribes to that.

    I pinged Ravikant Rao for an LJ invite code. I’ll mail that to you.

    Yeah, I’ve gone by the handle of khorgath for a while. Heh. We’re both in the Saints ML, but I’m mostly a lurker there. Was active in BLUG for a while, but that was as ’sush’. Khorgath is actually more of my gaming handle that made its way into being my online handle because ’sush’ is usually not available in most places, whereas ‘khorgath’ always is. Oh well.

  9. Ravi 06. Mar, 2003 at 12:08 AM #

    Okay now I want to sign up for LJ but both ravipratap and ravi_pratap are taken ! Isn’t there way of saying that I am the same person and that I would like to syndicate instead of logging and of course, use the login to post comments etc ?

    Thanks for the invite – help me through this and I shall be grateful :-)

  10. ravi 06. Mar, 2003 at 8:49 PM #

    Pshaw, it takes khorgath to get you on LJ despite my bugging you for all these years. *LART* Anyways, fix yourself “ravipm” or “aarpm” or “ivar” (ravi backwards) or something. Lets not get underscores and suchlike, me thinks. And yes, I emailed khorgath an LJ invite code too.

  11. chai 08. Jul, 2003 at 3:48 AM #

    hey well if you have a extra code that you dont need can you plz send me one ^.^ ive been looking for one no one will give me one..i know you will ^.^ thanx

  12. Amber 13. Jul, 2003 at 3:23 AM #

    I too have been looking everywhere for invite codes and i desperatley need one! Will someone please send me one?

    My e-mail: myegghasatemp@yahoo.com or sweet_16_201056@yahoo.com

  13. Mark 20. Aug, 2003 at 11:03 AM #

    Er, me too. My friends used their invite codes like, right after they got their LJ’s, so if someone would be so kind…

    My email addy is guerra_marcus@yahoo.com

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