[Xymon] [xymon] a small ps parsing bug hp-ux 11.23 ia64?

Gore, David W david.gore at verizonbusiness.com
Sat Apr 30 04:46:52 CEST 2011


Here is a sample ps output:

> ps -Al -o pid,ppid,user,stime,state,pri,pcpu,time,vsz,args|grep tl1_am

It may not be clear here with outlook formatting the text but it would
appear that the ps output gets shifted towards the right to accommodate
a bigger time column which leads to a parsing bug.

My PROCS statement looks for this:

PROC %^vt_tl1_am$ 1 TEXT=vt_tl1_am

This will fail to find the process below if the time field goes over its
allocated column space.  I am assuming because it determines the ps
fields based on column boundaries?

 2316  1421 dwgore   02:28:43 S 154  0.00    00:00     128 grep tl1_am
10480     1 temip     Apr 20  R 152 35.78 1-00:27:52 1296976 vt_tl1_am

If I remove the time entry from the ps list of parameters from
hobbitclient-hp-ux.sh then the ps will look like this:

dwgore at ndctfb8:/var/opt/vzb/nmsbb/client/bin> ps -Ax -o
pid,ppid,user,stime,state,pri,pcpu,vsz,args|grep vt_tl1_am
 8098  7808 dwgore   02:42:52 R 154  0.00     128 grep vt_tl1_am
10480     1 temip     Apr 20  R 152 26.82 1296976 vt_tl1_am

And parsing will succeed.  Should I go ahead and remove the time column
from all my hosts to work around this bug since I am not sure it is used
anyway?

~David




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