Zombie Crystal Reports, part 2

See part 1.

I am hunting for long-running Crystal Reports on a PeopleSoft report server. Obviously there are a number of ways to see these, e.g., the PeopleSoft process monitor or Oracle data dictionary v$ views. I need a way to see these at the Windows process level, so I can kill them.

The PowerShell way to get process information is get-process. How did I learn this? Well, I googled it. That's a limitation of the command line: it's not all that discoverable. In contrast to a GUI, it's often hard to just poke around the tool itself to find stuff out. This page at Microsoft shows a number of things you can do with get-process.

Aside: get-process is a cmdlet (pronounced commandlet), which are the basic building-blocks in PowerShell.

By default, it shows all processes, and eight columns of attributes, none of which has anything to do with start time:

PS C:\temp\ps1> get-process

Handles NPM(K) PM(K)  WS(K) VM(M)  CPU(s)    Id ProcessName
------- ------ -----  ----- -----  ------    -- -----------
88       3     2124    4300    39    5.39   308 Avconsol
86       3     2248    4096    44   25.66  1280 Avsynmgr
89       3     1916    3552   421    1.58  3468 bash
65       4    19216   18972    74    4.23   200 chrome
713     15    42024   56864   138  481.77  1372 chrome
61       3     8948    2448    60    0.80  1700 chrome
61       5    17168    3148    73    4.50  1916 chrome
61       3    11548    4684    65   10.64  2056 chrome
62       3    54004   15736   121   13.83  2228 chrome
...

Yes, I have a lot of Chrome tabs open. You don't know the half of it...

To find out what other attributes get-process can report, pipe it to cmdlet get-member:

PS C:\temp\ps1> get-process | get-member

TypeName: System.Diagnostics.Process

Name          MemberType     Definition
----          ----------     ----------
Handles       AliasProperty  Handles = Handlecount
Name          AliasProperty  Name = ProcessName
NPM           AliasProperty  NPM = NonpagedSystemMemorySize
PM            AliasProperty  PM = PagedMemorySize
VM            AliasProperty  VM = VirtualMemorySize
WS            AliasProperty  WS = WorkingSet
add_Disposed  Method         System.Void add_Disposed(EventHandler value)
...

It goes on and on and on from there, eventually showing us this:

StartTime  Property  System.DateTime StartTime {get;}

Get used to "get-member." I know I'll be using it all the time.

To see that property, pipe it to the cmdlet Select-Object. We'll also send it a process name with a wildcard to just see PeopleSoft-related processes:

PS C:\temp\ps1> get-process ps* | select-object Id, ProcessName, StartTime

Id   ProcessName   StartTime
--   -----------   ---------
3484 psadmin       3/26/2009 8:48:36 AM
2024 psaesrv       5/27/2009 5:41:20 PM
2328 psaesrv       5/26/2009 5:58:13 PM
3116 psaesrv       5/19/2009 12:23:18 PM
3344 psdstsrv      5/28/2009 3:32:49 AM
3472 psdstsrv      4/2/2009 6:05:18 AM
2344 psmonitorsrv  5/28/2009 6:05:17 AM
3132 psprcsrv      4/2/2009 6:05:19 AM
3388 pssqr         5/28/2009 1:13:50 PM

Here we can see some App Engine servers, various report server processes like distribution servers, and an SQR. No Crystal Reports at all. I was hoping for a zombie so we could kill it. Another day.

So we can report on the start time, but how do we filter on it? Let's say we want to see everthing started in the last two hours:

PS C:\temp\ps1> $now = Get-Date
PS C:\temp\ps1> $then = $now.AddSeconds(-7200)
PS C:\temp\ps1> get-process | where-object {$_.StartTime -gt $then}

Handles  NPM(K) PM(K)  WS(K) VM(M)  CPU(s)    Id ProcessName
-------  ------ -----  ----- -----  ------    -- -----------
31       1     1888     2608    12    0.03  2480 pssqr
79       4     5220    10056    44    0.06  1624 sqlplus
78       5    12816    16828    66    0.20  2576 sqrw

Grab the current time with Get-Date; calculate a time two hours ago (7200 seconds = 2 hours), and, via cmdlet Where-Object, show all processes started after that. Here we see that the report server has recently launched an SQR and a SQL*Plus script.

I could easily have asked for just the Crystal Reports, though since there weren't any running, it's a good thing I didn't.

In part three I may finally get around to killing the zombies.