If you’re new to Solaris, like me, you may have noticed an annoying limitation of the default ps program built into Solaris. It truncates the commands at 80 characters! To make matters worse, the man pages don’t mention anything about this issue.
The reason the man pages offer no help is because this is a kernel issue. It was decided back in 1994 that 80 characters should be enough. Since the kernel does not store more than 80 characters, ps has no way of accessing this information. Ironicly, later that decade the same company invented their “language to end all languages”, Java. Unfortunately Java’s design typically resulted in CLASSPATH values much longer than 80 characters prepended to many commands.
There is an easy solution, though. Rather than fixing the problem Sun left us the old ps tool. While this does not use their new fancy API and is probably much less efficient, it somehow has access to the full command for all running processes. It’s officially deprecated, so use at your own risk, but here’s the equivalent of ps -ef:
/usr/ucb/ps axww
Note the different path to the command. Time to set up an alias.
