Pgrep
Command-line utility that searches and displays named processes
pgrep is a command-line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system by Mike Shapiro. It has since been available in illumos and reimplemented for the Linux and BSDs (DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It searches for all the named processes that can be specified as extended regular expression patterns, and, by default, returns their process ID. Alternatives include pidof (finds process ID given a program name) and ps.
01Example usage
The default behaviour of pgrep (returning the process identifier of the named tasks) simplifies an otherwise complex task and is invoked with:
$ pgrep 'bash'Which is roughly equivalent to:
$ ps ax | awk '{sub(/.*\//, "", $5)} $5 ~ /bash/ {print $1}'Additional functionality of pgrep is listing the process name as well as the PID (-l Lists the process name as well as the process ID) of all processes belonging to the group alice (-G Only match processes whose real group ID is listed. Either the numerical or symbolical value may be used):
$ pgrep -l -G aliceshowing all processes that do not belong to the user root (-u euid Only match processes whose effective user ID is listed. Either the numerical or symbolical value may be used) by inverting the matching (-v Negates the matching):
$ pgrep -v -u rootand only matching the most recently started process (-n Select only the newest (most recently started) of the matching processes):
$ pgrep -n # The most recent process started $ pgrep -n -u alice emacs # The most recent `emacs` process started by user `alice`Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Pgrep”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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