I have a process whose command line is longer than 4096 characters. When I tried ps wwwp <pid>, I see the command line is truncated at 4096 characters. cat /proc/<pid>/cmdline gave me the same result. Is there a way for me to see the entire command line? I assume 4096 is a default value which I can set somewhere.

Here is my system:

Linux dev1-28 2.6.18-92.1.13.el5.028stab059.6 #1 SMP Fri Nov 14 16:01:01 MSK 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I am running Centos 5. Thanks.

Have you tried to pipe it into a file?

To see full command options, I've always used:

• $ ps auxww (bsd style); or
• $ ps -ef

But... I don't think I've ever had a command + options exceeding 4096 bytes.

If that is not working out, you might review the "-o format" option in the ps(1) manpages. Perhaps a bit of tinkering and you'll get it to display. (Either that or there's a hardcoded limitation in place; I'm not sure.)

Try where PID is, er, the PID of interest.

You might try (as root):

and see if anything interesting turns up. I just tried that and didn't see anything that looked like it might apply to your concern. (But I did see three errors I didn't understand. ) Or ... it could be something that is compiled into the kernel that can't be changed at run time. As a last ditch effort (that is unlikely to succeed) you might take a look at parameters you can supply to the kernel at boot time.

Realize that I am just making wild guesses here. This is *way* above my pay grade!

First of all, thanks for all the replies. And wow, I did not expect this to be a hard problem. I thought it was something well known, even expecting some RTFMs. Anyway, glad we are going to learn something new. Here are some additional information:

* I did try to pipe the output to a file, like ps wwwp pid > file. That did not help.
* I did try cat /proc/pid/cmdline, that gave me the same output as ps did. I mentioned this in my original post.
* Following suggestion from blackhole54, I did sysctl -a | grep 4096, and got
net.ipv4.udp_wmem_min = 4096
net.ipv4.udp_rmem_min = 4096
net.ipv4.tcp_dma_copybreak = 4096
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 4194304
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 16384 4194304
kernel.pty.max = 4096
kernel.random.poolsize = 4096
kernel.shmmni = 4096

I don't think any of these are related to the problem.
* I don't have any boot time kernel parameters specified. My grub file says
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.13.el5.028stab059.6 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
BTW is there a way I can query the boot parameter used while the system is running?

Anyhow, I suspect this is compiled into the kernel. Just out of curiosity, I wonder if other people are also seeing this. I wrote a simple shell script that will run a command longer than 4096 chars. Can some of you try it on your computer and let me know if you see the same problem? Here is how to do it
1 save the following shell script and run it
#!/bin/sh

# build a string of 5000 chars
long_arg=''
for i in $(seq 1 500)
do
long_arg=${long_arg}0123456789
done

# issue a blocking command with the long arg
exec awk "/$long_arg/{print}"

2 the awk command should block. In a separate terminal, do ps auxwww | grep awk. Do you see the command truncated?

Thanks!

A colleague of mine pointed me to the answer:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...096-byte-limit

That is rather discouraged around here. Although I have, very politely, in a effect told a few people that. After telling them where the FM was and how to use it.