Getting around truncated "ps"

This works for me, at least on Joyent SmartMachine:

/usr/ucb/ps auxwwww

You assumption about ps behavior is incorrect. Even while you aren't logged as root, "/usr/ucb/ps -ww" doesn't truncate arguments for processes you own, i.e. for processes you can kill which are the only one you are interested in.

$ cat /etc/release
                    Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 s10x_u9wos_14a X86
     Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
                            Assembled 11 August 2010
$ id
uid=1000(jlliagre) gid=1000(jlliagre)
$ /usr/ucb/ps | grep abc
  2035 pts/3    S  0:00 /bin/ksh ./abc aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbb
$ /usr/ucb/ps -ww | grep abc
  2035 pts/3    S  0:00 /bin/ksh ./abc aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

I would suggest pgrep and pkill - http://www.opensolarisforum.org/man/man1/pkill.html - instead.

Edit 0:

How about this ugly procfs hack instead:

~$ for f in /proc/[0-9]*/cmdline; do if grep -q --binary-files=text KEYWORD $f; \
 > then l=`dirname $f`;p=`basename $l`; echo "killing $p"; kill $p; fi; done

I'm sure there's a shorter incantation for this but my shell-fu is a bit rusty.
Disclaimers: only tested in bash on Linux, would probably match itself too.

pargs will help here. though you'll have to iterate through all of the running procs which is a little annoying. but this will at least show you all of a procs arguments when ps would truncate them.

user@machine:(/home/user)> pargs 23097
23097:  /usr/bin/bash ./test.sh aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbb
argv[0]: /usr/bin/bash
argv[1]: ./test.sh
argv[2]: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
argv[3]: bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
argv[4]: ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc