ls is bad but I nominate ps as the ultimate basket case.

bigger_cheese · on Sept 11, 2015

Yes I'm a 'ps -ef' guy and my coworker uses 'ps aux' forget vim vs emacs this causes the most arguments.

UnoriginalGuy · on Sept 11, 2015

But aux gives you the %CPU and %MEM columns in addition to what -ef gives you. That's a winner for why I would always opt for using aux.

Often times when I am running ps that's exactly the information I want to see.

I guess you could argue ef's length as an advantage but if you're on a 1080 screen, meh.

gknoy · on Sept 11, 2015

I only recently learned that fax` prints a tree of processes! Not always what I want, but good to find which python processes are the ones I want to kill, and which are not. :)

thrownaway2424 · on Sept 11, 2015

Whoa! I always use pstree for that.

bigger_cheese · on Sept 11, 2015

-ef shows you the parent pid which aux doesn't. My usage for ps tends to be to get pid information so I can kill processes with it. When a misbehaving parents spawns a lot of children easier to kill the parent.

I use 'w' command if I want CPU info.