What is the OS X / BSD equivalent of the GNU "ps auxf" command?

Solution 1:

pstree is generally part of the default install or easily installable on bsd systems. That's what I use. For example, you can install it via macports on a mac.

Solution 2:

Htop is also a really good process viewer, and it has "tree" view as one of it's main options in the lower status bar (F5).

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Solution 3:

So far I don't believe OSX has a built in that does this.

But here's an answer I posted on stackexchange as well; a small perl script that determines the process hierarchy and prints it in an indented form using the output of OSX's built-in ps(1).

Tested on OSX 10.6 and 10.9, and should work on linux as well (Sci Linux 6).

#!/usr/bin/perl
# treeps -- show ps(1) as process hierarchy -- v1.0 [email protected] 07/08/14
my %p;                    # Global array of pid info
sub PrintLineage($$) {    # Print proc lineage
  my ($pid, $indent) = @_;
  printf("%s |_ %-8d %s\n", $indent, $pid, $p{$pid}{cmd});  # print
  foreach my $kpid (sort {$a<=>$b} @{ $p{$pid}{kids} } ) {  # loop thru kids
    PrintLineage($kpid, "   $indent");                       # Recurse into kids
  }
}
# MAIN
open(FD, "ps axo ppid,pid,command|");
while ( <FD> ) { # Read lines of output
  my ($ppid,$pid,$cmd) = ( $_ =~ m/(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s(.*)/ ); # parse ps(1) lines
  $p{$pid}{cmd} = $cmd;
  $p{$pid}{kids} = ();
  push(@{ $p{$ppid}{kids} }, $pid); # Add our pid to parent's kid
}
PrintLineage(1, "");     # recurse to print lineage starting with pid 1