Hiding command line parameters from ps -ef

you could try using "cut" depending on your scenario.  

Example:

If you always saw this in your ps -ef:

root  1609     1    1   Jun 20 ?        4:37 bin/usd /usr/spool/uv -t

Purely for example.

You could use cut to grab just the output that you want.  Suppose I wanted just everything before the first ":" in the above line I'd use:

ps -ef | cut -d":" -f1

-d":" is the delimiter of :
-f1 is the occurence of the output (i.e 1)

The above would yield:

root  1609     1    1   Jun 20 ?        4

So, it MAY work depending on what parameters are passed and whether there's always a generic characcter you can use for the delimiter.

Neil

Thanks Neil, but that's not quite what I'm after.  I need to stop the parameters from appearing in the ps output at all, e.g. to stop other users from snooping at my command line input.

Example:
Somewhere in a script there is a call to a custom C program, and a username and password are passed as parameters.  The problem is that this C program and its parameters are visible in the ps -ef listing, so anyone can snoop around and grab the username and password.

Unfortunatly messing with the C is not an option, so I need a general solution.

Thanks.  Found another solution but this deals with the remaining cases.