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Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

Terminal - Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one
ps aux | grep [p]rocess-name
2009-08-13 05:44:45
User: olorin
Functions: grep ps
57
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

As an alternative to using an additional grep -v grep you can use a simple regular expression in the search pattern (first letter is something out of the single letter list ;-)) to drop the grep command itself.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
pgrep command_name
2009-08-15 17:03:57
User: dstahlke
11
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

Get the PID of a process by name

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
ps axu | grep [a]pache2
2012-12-15 19:37:19
User: EBAH
Functions: grep ps
11
Up
Down
grep processes list avoiding the grep itself

Trick to avoid the form:

grep process | grep - v grep

Show sample output | Comments (7) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
ps -ef | grep c\\ommand
2011-01-04 11:43:14
User: ioggstream
Functions: grep ps
Tags: grep ps
6
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

faster ;) but your idea is really cool

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
ps -C command
2009-08-14 15:30:42
User: recursiverse
Functions: ps
4
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

preferred way to query ps for a specific process name (not supported with all flavors of ps, but will work on just about any linux afaik)

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ps -ef | awk '/process-name/ && !/awk/ {print}'
2009-08-19 11:22:09
User: dopeman
Functions: awk ps
1
Up
Down
Search for an active process without catching the search-process

This does the same thing as many of the 'grep' based alternatives but allows a more finite control over the output. For example if you only wanted the process ID you could change the command:

ps -ef | awk '/mingetty/ && !/awk/ {print $2}'

If you wanted to kill the returned PID's:

ps -ef | awk '/mingetty/ && !/awk/ {print $2}' | xargs -i kill {}
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Why does it work?

Comment by Weboide 197 weeks ago

I think I understand now, it's cause it appears exactly as "[p]rocess-name" in the process list.

Comment by Weboide 197 weeks ago

correctly :D

Comment by olorin 197 weeks ago

it works because "[p]rocess name" is really a regular expression which matches "process name" but not "grep [p]rocess name" because only grep interprets the [ and ] characters specially. The brackets form a character class: http://www.regular-expressions.info/charclass.html

Comment by bwoodacre 197 weeks ago

wicked, thanks for sharing this

Comment by masterofdisaster 196 weeks and 6 days ago

That was brilliant. Very cool.

Comment by Patola 196 weeks and 6 days ago

This is so helpful.

I have been working on a script to capture memeory usage of a few processes that launch child processes at intervals. This helps clean up the logs I am capturing.

Thanks!!! :-D

Comment by DaveQB 196 weeks and 6 days ago

PS how did you guys get a custom avatar?

Comment by DaveQB 196 weeks and 6 days ago

@DaveQB it's gravatar (gravatar.com). I had to go to my profile and re-save for it to work.

Comment by claytron 196 weeks and 6 days ago

why this not work on zsh?

ps axu | grep [a]pache2

zsh: no matches found: [a]pache2

zsh --version

zsh 4.3.17 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)

Comment by hvnsweeting 20 weeks ago

Your point of view

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