Unix Q: Substring-ing an output.

Hi All,

I want to feed my shell script with the names of currently running databases. I thought of using ps -ef|grep [p]mon. What I got was the following:

  oracle 20113     1  0   Oct 25 ?        0:01 ora_pmon_TLDEV
  oracle   898     1  0   Jul 22 ?        0:06 ora_pmon_TLQA
  oracle   944     1  0   Jul 22 ?        0:07 ora_pmon_TLQAVAR
  oracle 19588     1  0   Oct 25 ?        0:00 ora_pmon_DBMON
  oracle 13509     1  0 12:16:13 ?        0:00 ora_pmon_RMAN
  oracle 20450     1  0   Oct 25 ?        0:00 ora_pmon_PRDINF
  oracle 13026     1  0   Oct 26 ?        0:00 ora_pmon_TLDVVAR

What I wanted is get only the db name part eg. TLDEV, RMAN, DBMON,etc. I don't want to rely on oratab file.
I was thinking of using 'cut' to cut out the last field and do some ${X##}
(variable pattern substitution) to get to the dbname bit. The trouble is
the number of fields in a ps -ef output is not consistent. As you can see I've just restarted RMAN and now it only has 8 fields as compared to 9 for the others.

Any suggestions? Or another way of doing it? Using KSH on Solaris 8.

Thanks.
Ross

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Author: Ross Collado
  INET: Ross.Collado_at_techpac.com

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