ps aux not wrapping lines

Question

When I do 'ps aux' a lot of the lines are longer than the width of my terminal, and not wrapping to the next line. At first I thought it was my stty settings, but I noticed that other commands like netstat do wrap lines in my terminal. I would prefer not to be forced to use less or some other pager.

Does anybody know why the lines are not wrapping? and how to fix?

Answer 1

ps is a rather old command. It reads the width of the terminal and sets up the format accordingly. You could override this with the --cols option.

 $ ps aux --cols 100
 ...
 user    29246  8.0 19.7 1748240 763200 ?      Sl   Dec05 364:04 /usr/lib/firefo
 x/firefox
 user    31490  0.0  1.0 235660 39256 ?        Sl   Dec05   0:06 /usr/bin/evince 
 /tmp/space_draft_wo
 ...

And then with longer lines

 $ ps aux --cols 120
 ...
 user    29246  8.0 19.7 1748240 763200 ?      Sl   Dec05 364:04 /usr/lib/firefo
 x/firefox
 user    31490  0.0  1.0 235660 39256 ?        Sl   Dec05   0:06 /usr/bin/evince 
 /tmp/space_draft_work_programme.pdf
 ...

Answer 2

There is also another simple solution:

echo "$(ps aux)"

The paranthesis will execute the command in a subshell which i guess has no width specification and therefore does not cut the lines, at least on every shell i tried this is the case.

Printing it with Quotes make the print command to keep the Newlines: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/en/man1/bash.1.html#contenttoc11

Answer 3

I know you mentioned piping it to less, but I still think piping to more or less is still the simplest solution, wherever you can afford it. (ie, in an interactive session)

Answer 4

from man(1) ps OUTPUT MODIFIERS

[UN*X]  -w   Wide output.  Use this option twice for unlimited width.
[BSD]   w    Wide output.  Use this option twice for unlimited width.

I tend to the UN*X variant ps -ef and add, as a mnemonic, word wrap to make: ~ $ ps -efww but ~ $ ps auxww is equivalent.