I'm looking for a way to detect a hung ftp process running on a unix server. I have the pattern to grep for in the process list and the way we determine if this particular process is "hung" is if the start time is an hour (or more) old. For example, this is the "hung" process: ecadmin 26123 26733 0.0 07:19:56 ?? 0:00.05 /usr/bin/ftp -niv ftp.companyname.com My script will be running periodically - this process started at 07:19:56, so if the time is 08:19:56 or later, I want to kill -9 26123. How can I get the difference between the process start time and the current time or is there some other unix command(s) I can use to list this process if it's over 1 hour old? I obviously can't use the cpu time because it's hung and doesn't increment. Any help would be greatly appreciated...thanks!

a good way to get the time difference is to use unix seconds for the date stamp, i.e. seconds since jan 1 1970. if you can work the date command and its many options to convert the hh:mm:ss from the ps line into seconds, the math is very simple to establish a hung ftp process. if you cut the hh:mm:ss fields and pass them as an argument to date -s it may be a way to start. the other thing is you could do the grep and kill on a custom log for the ftp server instead of dealing with ps. hope that helps