Use process cmd from ps-list (instead of/with) the name

[kmarques]

I think it would be easer to find a process if the full command is used instead of the name.
Indeed, if i have couple of node process running in background, i will have

node 1337
node 1338
node 1339

but if the full command is displayed

node foo.js 1337
node bar.js 1338
node foo-bar.js 1339

an other display could be

node 1337 `node foo.js`
node 1338 `node bar.js`
node 1339 `node foo-bar.js`

[dnbkr]

I added support for this with PR #14 - if that gets merged then searching by full command will be possible with fkill -v

[sindresorhus]

The reason I didn't use the command with arguments by default is that it's very verbose. It includes the full path to the binary. I could find no way to just extract the arguments as I couldn't split on a space as ps returns paths with spaces unquoted (Happy to be shown otherwise!).

Ideally we would show the binary (without full path) and arguments by default, but as I said, I couldn't find a way to do it cleanly. We could maybe do it for known cases like python and node as we know the binary name, so we could predictable parse it.

[sindresorhus]

I looked into this more, and I might have a solution to get the arguments without the full path. It seems ps -o pid -o comm returns the full path without arguments and ps -o pid -o command returns with arguments. So we could get both columns and just diff them to get the arguments. I think this should be added as a new property in ps-list. So we could add an args property with just the arguments and a path property with the full path to the binary without arguments, just for completeness.

[dnbkr]

:) I came to the same conclusion last night - wasn't sure how to sort it for Windows users though (and also don't have a window machine, so could not test)

Shall I leave the changes to ps-list to you? Perhaps, if you're busy, we could look at the integration back into fkill-client in another merge and complete this PR #14 without it?

[sindresorhus]

wasn't sure how to sort it for Windows users though (and also don't have a window machine, so could not test)

Seems like it should be possible: http://superuser.com/questions/415360/how-do-i-find-out-command-line-arguments-of-a-running-program, but I'm not that concerned about it. We can leave it as PR welcome if any Windows users wants it.

Shall I leave the changes to ps-list to you? Perhaps, if you're busy, we could look at the integration back into fkill-client in another merge and complete this PR #14 without it?

I probably won't have time to do the ps-list changes, so I'll leave them PR welcome, but your PR is not dependent on it.

[sindresorhus]

I opened an issue on ps-list: sindresorhus/ps-list#7 (Help welcome)

[pirate]

I'd like to counter that often the path of the binary is useful for searching, I often kill python processes by searching for the virtualenv the bin is located in. g.g. if I want to kill all processes for a particular project, I'll search for ~/.virtualenvs/projectname/bin.

Maybe we could allow searching the full path, but display an abbreviated version if it's above a certain number of characters?
/bin/sh -c "echo hi"
/U/n/.v/p/bin/python arg1 arg2 arg3 <- path shortened to first letter of each dir except last one

[sindresorhus]

@pirate Good point. I would differentiate plain binaries and apps though. For apps you don't care about the path, but you might for binaries. Maybe just doing /Users/sindresorhus/dev/bin/python -> ~/dev/bin/python would be enough. What would have been more useful than the full path is to include the path of where the binary was started, but I don't think that information is available.

You can see the full path with fkill -v now.