How to display the 10 most recently started processes
By Daniel Rodriguez •
I am trying to pipe the output of ps -ax -o pid,lstart into an awk and work with that or try to sort by a certain column using sort.
The output of ps -ax -o pid,lstart is something like:
PID STARTED 1 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 2 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 3 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 4 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 6 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 8 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 9 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 10 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 11 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 12 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 14 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 15 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 16 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 17 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 18 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020 20 Tue Feb 4 23:10:00 2020Which makes the job much more difficult because I'd have to sort by day first, then an hour, minute, and second...
21 Answer
Similar to this related answer
you could use etimes as a proxy for lstart giving you a value in seconds that permits a simple numeric sort ex.
$ ps -eoetimes=,pid=,lstart= | sort -rnk1,1 | tail -10 824 13816 Thu Feb 6 08:23:48 2020 595 13851 Thu Feb 6 08:27:37 2020 563 13865 Thu Feb 6 08:28:09 2020 502 13882 Thu Feb 6 08:29:10 2020 443 13896 Thu Feb 6 08:30:09 2020 83 13965 Thu Feb 6 08:36:09 2020 70 13966 Thu Feb 6 08:36:22 2020 0 13983 Thu Feb 6 08:37:32 2020 0 13982 Thu Feb 6 08:37:32 2020 0 13981 Thu Feb 6 08:37:32 2020From man ps:
etimes ELAPSED elapsed time since the process was started, in seconds. lstart STARTED time the command started. See also bsdstart, start, start_time, and stime.
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