Process & Resource Monitoring (Top/Htop/Ps/Systemd)

Stop ps from truncating your long process commands

🧩 The Challenge

Trying to debug a java application or a complex cron job only to see a trailing bunch of dots instead of the actual arguments is a special kind of hell. You end up staring at a process list where every line looks identical because the shell truncates the part you actually need to see.

💡 The Fix

Just tack on the extra column headers to force the output to expand as far as your terminal window allows, giving you the full picture of what your processes are actually doing.

ps auxww --columns 200

⚙️ Why It Works

Adding the double w flag tells ps not to truncate output, and the columns flag forces the layout to respect a wider width rather than fitting into a narrow default terminal size.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Alias this as psx in your bashrc so you can stop manually typing the flags every time you’re panicking during an incident.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/29/2026