Created attachment 145651 [details]
code patch for ps(1)

This patch adds a field (sstart) to ps(1) to print the time, in seconds since January 1st 1970, when a process started.

On Solaris (and the same works on Linux I believe), you can stat(2) /proc/<pid> and inspect the mtime of the directory to determine this information, however on BSD (1) /proc doesn't set the mtime on these directories and (2) /proc is most-likely going to be removed in future releases.

Examples:

Simple example useful for scripting

$ ./ps -p $$ -o sstart=
1407708424

All "started" fields currently available for the current process

$ ./ps -p $$ -o start,lstart,sstart
STARTED STARTED                  STARTED
10:07PM Sun Aug 10 22:07:04 2014 1407708424

`sstart` is the most convenient for scripting purposes.