Hello, i have made a script who will kill all processe with defunct. but in the kill-list are the entry from my grep-command :-( Itīs possible to extract the list without the root-user? My svript: #!/bin/ksh PATH=/usr/bin:/bin export PATH user='defunct' #this could be a program name also proclist=`ps -ef | grep $user | cut -c16-20` rm -f /tmp/delpid echo "cron script running on \c" >>/tmp/delpid uname -a >>/tmp/delpid echo "Following processes removed for $user" >>/tmp/delpid date >>/tmp/delpid echo "PASS 1 - cleanup" >>/tmp/delpid for proc in $proclist;do kill $proc echo "kill $proc" >>/tmp/delpid done sleep 30 #wait thirty seconds to give stuff a chance to die echo "PASS 2 - double check (should be blank below)" >>/tmp/delpid proclist=`ps -ef | grep $user | cut -c16-20` for proc in $proclist;do kill -9 $proc echo "kill -9 $proc" >>/tmp/delpid done mail admin_user # rm -f /tmp/delpid thx Henk

Try: proclist=`ps -ef | grep $user | sed -e '/grep/d' | cut -c16-20` G.