Viewing processes running (ps -ef)

When I use ps -ef it will display the processes but it seems to have a limit as to how many character it prints.

For instance I run a script
ABC.pl -arg1 "something" -arg2 "something2" -arg3 "something3"

When I do a ps -ef it will display
ABC.pl -arg1 "something"

But not the rest

Please note I just shortened this because I do not want the names of my commands on the forum so I couldn't cut and paste.

Is there a limit to how many character it will show and is it possible to display more? Is there another way I can view which processes are running?

yes, ps has an historical limit to 80 chars
but if you use sys5rel4 ps
you can say it what you want
see the -o option in man pages

Can you give me an example? The man pages are confusing me.

%U - means show the username
%p - means show the process pid
%c - means show the command
%a - show arguments

The man page lists all of this, if your system supports this extended feature.

I tried that and got:

$ ps -eo "%U %p %c %a"
ps: unknown output format: -o %U
ps: unknown output format: -o %p
ps: unknown output format: -o %c
ps: unknown output format: -o %a
usage: ps [ -aAdeflcjLPy ] [ -o format ] [ -t termlist ]
[ -u userlist ] [ -U userlist ] [ -G grouplist ]
[ -p proclist ] [ -g pgrplist ] [ -s sidlist ]
'format' is one or more of:
user ruser group rgroup uid ruid gid rgid pid ppid pgid sid taskid
pri opri pcpu pmem vsz rss osz nice class time etime stime
f s c lwp nlwp psr tty addr wchan fname comm args projid project

What is sys5rel4???

sys5rel4 = system 5 release 4 = SVR4
exemple: sun's solaris is SVR4 since 1994

ps -ef gives:
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD

ps -efocomm,ppid,pid gives:
CMD PPID PID

note the output ORDER!

say, you look for pid of 'abcdef'
the traditional way is: ps|grep|grep -v|awk
people who realized, you can force 'ps' to give (gratis) an other
output uses: ps -efocomm,pid | sed -ne "s/.*abcdef.* //p"
(note the space before //p) also 2 commands less for the same
result. on a standalone sys, it's irrelevant; on a (big)server making
a lot of process-monitoring it's saving cpu-time.

sure, when performance is an issue, i will NOT use 'ps' but
scan the /proc directory (about 200 times faster).

Not all *nix systems have /proc, nor do they support the -o format option the way I outlined. One of the problems with learning the shell is that different Unix flavors have different command sets - what guggach is saying.

You read your man page - you posted the uuid, etc formats, use them instead of what I showed you.

There is a book 'UNIX complete' from Sybex. It actually covers all of the flavors of *nix pretty well. Try finding a copy - it's great for beginners.