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.

Answer 1

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

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

will probably suffice

Answer 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

Answer 3

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. :)