In order to search for a process you can use ps with grep.
For example to search for firefox
ps aux | grep firefox
How to get the same answer without using grep?
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The pgrep command, and its sibling pkill, exists precisely for this purpose:
pgrep firefoxwill list all processes whose commands matchfirefoxpgrep -f firefoxwill list all processes whose entire command lines matchfirefoxpgrep -x firefoxwill list all processes whose commands exactly matchfirefox- ... and so on.
And naturally, pgrep will exclude itself from the match, so none of the grep rituals associated with ps | grep are needed.
The other set of tools for this are the pidof and killall commands. These aren't as flexible as pgrep and pkill.
pidof firefoxwill list processes whose command isfirefox
muru
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Useful if you have a long command name and/or command line args is
pgrep -f foowhich uses the full process name to matchfoo– Charlie G Oct 07 '22 at 16:10
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ps -fC process-name
example:
ps -fC firefox
from man ps
-C cmdlist Select by command name.
This selects the processes whose executable name is
given in cmdlist.
-f Do full-format listing. This option can be combined
with many other UNIX-style options to add additional
columns. It also causes the command arguments to be
printed. When used with -L, the NLWP (number of
threads) and LWP (thread ID) columns will be added. See
the c option, the format keyword args, and the format
keyword comm.
Maythux
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5This is the best answer but unfortunately doesn't work on OSX. The BSD
ps -Cflag behaves completely differently - "Change the way the CPU percentage is calculated" – mastaBlasta Jan 09 '18 at 17:28
5
A cool trick
$ps -ejH
You will get all the processes with names
exmple:
1747 568 568 ? 00:00:00 colord
1833 1832 1832 ? 00:00:00 gnome-keyring-d
2263 568 568 ? 00:00:00 udisksd
2311 2311 2311 ? 00:00:00 cupsd
2315 2315 2311 ? 00:00:00 dbus
Redirect or so copy the output to a file and then open nano,
press Ctrl+W
and you can search for the name you want.
3
top allows you to search for string when you hit uppercase L; the process will be highlighted, and use up and down arrow keys to scroll through list of processes. Similarly,
htop command allows highlighting a particular process when you hit /. And \ will filter all the processes with a particular string in the name.
For those who like awk, here's an awk oneliner: ps -eF | awk '/process-name/ {print $11}'
. With ps -eF process name is always in 11th column. Alternatively if you do ps -eF | awk '{print $11}' | sort you get a sorted list of processes names, sorted alphabetically. Pipe it into less command just to view the long list of files easier.
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
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If the reason you don't want to use ps | grep is because it loses the first line (the column headers), you can do:
ps aux | grep 'firefox\|^USER'
This is grepping for a line that contains firefox or a line that starts with USER (the first line of header line on my distro).
Kip
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You can also use htop and then hit F4 to filter the results with a matching user-defined string. You also have a custom search feature available by hitting F3.
JoErNanO
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If two processes is the problem, you can use only grep:
grep firefox /proc/*/cmdline
user1497298
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ps/grepsolution works so well? – neuronet Nov 04 '18 at 15:36ps -n <process name>that would answer his need.ps -n firefoxis a bit shorter thanps | grep firefox.pscan already filter onpidor processes for a user id, so it's a reasonable question to filter on process name. – Jochem Schulenklopper Nov 07 '18 at 09:04