English is spoken as a first language by over 300 million people, and by about five times that number if you include people who can speak it as a second or third language. But that doesn't mean that word and wording is going to be the same within different variants, let alone the subtleties and drifts, where somethings that's just a mild comment in English can be offensive to an American, and vice versa.

In a way, it's a bit the same with flavours of Unix and Linux - something that works on Solaris may not work on OS X, and a Linux command that you've come to rely on on your shared hosting service turns out to have not been loaded on the basic build on your new dedicated host - ah - these things are sent to try us!

Take the ps command - for process status,

In the old SunOS 4.1.3 days, it used to be second nature to type ps -aux but that was a Berkeley Software Distribution (bsd) based Unix and when Sun switched to System V.4 (AT&T based) at Solaris 2 / SunOS 5, the recommended command became ps elf which presented broadly the same information is a somewhat different format.

You'll notice that the - (minus sign) has gone from the "option" list, and I recall being told that happened because they're not really options, but rather they are a description of how the thing is to work. And if they're not options, you don't need a minus sign! ((The same thing applies to tar - where it's tar cvf rather than tar -cvf))

There days, under Linux, I find some delegates using ps ef and others using ps aux. But there are other useful options ... and I surprised one of my delegates by suggesting he use

ps auxwww

Odd? Yes, it is a bit. The "w" descriptor means "wide" - or in this case "wide, wide, wide" ... so that lines reported are not truncated to the screen width. ps auxwww outputs the complete command line used to start all processes, and in this instance was vital to allow my delegate to see all the various options used in starting up Tomcat, including the option that specified which particular JVM release it was to use, and where that was to be loaded from.
(written 2008-08-21, updated 2008-08-22)

 A164 - Web Application Deployment - Services and Regular Jobs
  [544] Repeating tasks with crontab - (2005-12-27)
  [907] Browser -> httpd -> Tomcat -> MySQL. Restarting. - (2006-10-28)
  [1028] Linux / Unix - process priority and nice - (2007-01-10)
  [1288] Linux run states, shell special commands, and directory structures - (2007-08-03)
  [1553] Automatic startup and shutdown of Tomcat - (2008-02-24)
  [1633] Changing a screen saver from a web page (PHP, Perl, OSX) - (2008-05-06)
  [1700] FTP server on Fedora Linux - (2008-07-06)
  [1731] Apache httpd, MySQL, PHP - installation procedure - (2008-08-01)
  [1733] memcached - overview, installation, example of use in PHP - (2008-08-02)
  [1903] daemons - what is running on my Linux server? - (2008-11-23)
  [2145] Using the internet to remotely check for power failure at home (PHP) - (2009-04-29)
  [2182] What Linux run level am I in? - (2009-05-15)
  [3011] What are .pid files? - (2010-10-23)
  [3143] On time - (2011-01-23)
  [3791] The Kernel, Shells and Daemons. Greek Gods in computing - (2012-07-01)
  [3792] Managing daemons from a terminal session - (2012-07-01)
  [4487] Starting MySQL. ERROR! The server quit without updating PID file - how we fixed it. - (2015-05-06)

A162 - Web Application Deployment - Backups and File System Management
  [153] Linux - where to put swap space - (2004-12-16)
  [334] Symbolic links and hard links - (2005-06-02)
  [554] What backup is adequate? - (2006-01-04)
  [593] Finding where the disc space has gone - (2006-02-06)
  [703] Copying files and preserving ownership - (2006-04-28)
  [735] Boys will be boys, saved by Ubuntu - (2006-05-27)
  [754] tar, jar, war, ear, sar files - (2006-06-10)
  [1013] Copy multiple files - confusing error message from cp - (2006-12-30)
  [1023] Finding public writeable things on your linux file system - (2007-01-06)
  [1439] Linux / Unix - layout of operating system files - (2007-11-20)
  [1648] The tourists guide to Linux - (2008-05-20)
  [1801] Will your backups work if you have to restore them? - (2008-09-18)
  [1893] Some Linux and Unix tips - (2008-11-18)
  [2299] How much space does my directory take - Linux - (2009-07-20)
  [4056] An overpractical test of our backup strategy! - (2013-03-30)
  [4063] Backups by crossover between network centres - setting up automatic scp transfers - (2013-04-13)
  [4115] More or less back - what happened to our server the other day - (2013-06-14)
  [4390] Checking MySQL database backups have worked (not failed) - (2015-01-10)
  [4400] Commenting out an echo killed my bash backup script - (2015-01-19)
  [4405] Backup procedures - via backup server - (2015-01-24)
  [4481] Extracting data from backups to restore selected rows from MySQL tables - (2015-05-01)

Back to Yank and Push - copy and move in vi

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Diagrams to show you how - Tomcat, Java, PHP

July child ponders on August children
What is built in to this httpd and PHP?
mod_proxy and mod_proxy_ajp - httpd
Diagrams to show you how - Tomcat, Java, PHP
Dialects of English and Unix
Yank and Push - copy and move in vi
Co-operating to save, yet we dont
WEB-INF (Tomcat) and .htaccess (httpd)
Logging Cookies with the Apache httpd web server
An opportunity for something new