Generally you use ps command to find out all running process. You may also pipe out ps command output via grep command to pickup desired output.
Basically you don't want display grep command as the process.
Let us run combination of ps and grep command to find out all perl processes:
$ ps aux | grep perl
Output:
vivek 4611 0.0 0.7 10044 6068 ? Ss 02:40 0:00 /usr/bin/perl apps/monitor/gwl.pl root 4853 0.0 0.7 10044 6068 ? Ss 02:40 0:00 /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/webmin/miniserv.pl /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf vivek 5166 0.0 0.0 2884 748 pts/0 R+ 03:06 0:00 grep perl
In above example you are getting the grep process itself. To ignore grep process from output, type any one of the following:
$ ps aux | grep perl | grep -v grep
OR
$ ps aux | grep '[p]erl'
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Also works when you’re grepping for something in the output of the history command.
Nice one. I am not going to use this – I really don’t mind the grep command appearing. Still, its clever.
This has been an annoyance of mine for awhile now. However, its a bit too syntactically taxing for the marginal gain.
Does anybody know how to set up an alias to accomplish the same goal?
Jerod,
alias not possible as passing args interpreted by shell at the time of creation. But something as follows should help out:
function pps(){ ps aux | grep "$@" | grep -v 'grep'; } pps perlVivek:
Thanks a lot. Added that function to my .bashrc and it works like a charm!
$ ps aux | grep ‘[p]erl’
can you explain how this work? regexp ?
Putting one letter inside square brackets won’t change the meaning of grep expression. However, it removes the grep command from the matched lines because the expression ‘[p]erl’ matches only ‘perl’, not ‘[p]erl’, which is how the grep command itself is now shown in the process list.
Thanks for the explanation
Thanks for ur wonderful suggestion in adding to .bashrc……… Good… keep it up
Thanks man! Good suggestion , I got fed up by looking the grep in process list (itself).
I use this function to view or grep all processes on my mac. For Linux you might have to change the switches on the ps command.
So using using pss command without arguments, you will get a full list of all processes.
if you use pss with a single argument, the function will grep all the processes and it will double space the output.
function pss () {
if [ -n "$1" ]
then
ps -ajx | grep -i “$1″ | grep -v “grep” | sed G
else
ps -ajx
fi
}
ps -C perl
“$ ps aux | grep perl | grep -v grep” made my day, thanks!
Question:
Why does ps -ef show grep in the output anyway?
My rudimentary understanding of the following command
ps -ef | grep ‘abc.sh’
says that the output of the first command (ps -ef) should be provided as input to the second command (grep ‘abc.sh’) which means that when ps -ef is triggered, the grep command does not exist.
My understanding is obviously flawed. Can someone throw light on what actually happens?
Jawsnn, I cannot answer that question. I am curious myself, but I just found another anomaly.
I am inside of my script and I want to check to make sure my script isn’t running anywhere else. It is a script that shouldn’t run concurrently because its doing system stuff. For simplicity, lets say the script is testScript.sh
Within the scripts I have:
isRunning=`ps -elf | grep testScript.sh | grep -v grep | grep -v vi | wc -l`
When I run this command outside the script (with or without the wc -l), it only ever shows 1 process when my script is running. However, inside the script it shows as two processes. It was a “wait” on the first process with a “pipe_w” on the second. This only seems to happen when I run the command within the script with the same name of the process I am running. If I am grepping for a process with another name, I do not see the same issue. This makes no sense to me.
Both processes are started immediately, that’s the point of using pipe.
Thanks that worked out well. As an added bonus for color reverse the above command to look like this in bash.rc:
function pps(){ ps aux | grep -v ‘grep’| grep “$@”; } pps perl
and uncomment this line in the same file:
alias grep=’grep –color=auto’
Now pps lighttpd gives a nice highlighted response
Ao! Thank you very much, this blog is awesome!