I need to write a script to kill user-processes from "ps -ef"-list older than x days. Thanks in advance.

Date might not be a good kill criteria. Many deamons are started at boot time and stay active till the machine is rebooted. init, nfsd, portmap are a few that come to mind. Probably your machine would not be happy if you killed off these system daemons. Another criteria perhaps?

hi david, thanks for your response. sure, but i want to kill just only user-processes (no deamons, no root-processes,etc...).the output of "ps -ef |grep ts08037I |awk '{print$5,$6}'" is: Sep 30 Nov 07 Sep 11 Sep 06 Sep 11 Sep 06 Sep 11 Sep 30 Nov 07 how can i compare this kind of date format with system date minus 3 days for example?

There is not a straight forward was as the shell does not work in epoch time. This leaves it up to you to develop case statements for each month and again for the days. Tiresome work. An alternative is to do this in perl that has access to many date manipulation libraries. Probably converting in all to Julian dates would be easiest for you. Jan 31 is day 31. Feb 28 is day 59. March 31 is day 90 and so on. Then you are left with simple integer math.

hi david, that's a good idea! Thanks a lot. have a nice weekend. bye robert