Unix sorting processes by date

Question

hello guys I am having troubles sorting by date, I have to keep just the newest proccess and kill the older ones

 ps -ef | grep -i my_username

then I get let's say 5 or 6 process but I don't know which one is the newest one pls help.

It seems unlikely that this is what you want to do. If there are more than 5 or 6 processes running under your name, your login shell will not be among the newest processes. Generally speaking, killing it will kill all your processes. — chepner, Feb 03 '14 at 17:40

Martin Dinov · Answer 1 · 2014-02-03T15:59:09.540

2

If you are doing this on Linux, this will sort the processes by start time:

ps -ef --sort=start_time

To get the top 5, you can pipe the output to head:

ps -ef --sort=start_time | head -n 6

I've specified 6 as the top row is a header.

For OS X, this will give you the top 5 oldest processes:

ps aux -O started | head -n 6

edited Feb 03 '14 at 15:59

answered Feb 03 '14 at 15:42

Martin Dinov

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I get this illegal option -- sort=start_time – Rubenex Feb 03 '14 at 15:51
What unix system is this - OS X? Also, just to be sure, there's no space after the `--`. – Martin Dinov Feb 03 '14 at 15:57
I wanted the last 10 ones ` ps -ef --sort=start_time | tail -n 10` – Stephane Jul 22 '19 at 15:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 03 '14 at 15:51

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Assuming none of your processes is more than 24 hours old,

ps -ef | grep -i my_username | sort +4

will probably suffice

answered Feb 03 '14 at 15:51

rojomoke

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 03 '14 at 15:42

If this is Linux, then you can get the start-time of your processes like this:

ps -u your_username -o pid,lstart,cmd

Though, since the lstart field is date-formatted, I'll admit it's a bit hard to sort on automatically. But if you only have "5 or 6 processes" to care about, then maybe you can just do that manually. :)

Unix sorting processes by date

3 Answers3