What does www mean in ps auxwww?

nrmb picture nrmb · Sep 4, 2017 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

I found that ps aux lists processes that are currently running and I found other people mentioning ps auxwww . I am wondering what this means? or what it does? What's the difference between ps aux and ps auxwww ?

Answer

Thilo picture Thilo · Sep 4, 2017

To quote the man page (on Mac OS, other systems will vary slightly, but the idea is the same):

-w
Use 132 columns to display information, instead of the default which is your window size. If the -w option is specified more than once, ps will use as many columns as necessary without regard for your window size. When output is not to a terminal, an unlimited number of columns are always used.