pgrep

pgrep is a command-line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system by Mike Shapiro. It has since been reimplemented for Linux and the 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.

Example 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 '/[p]rocessname/ {print $1}'

(With a redundant `grep`:)

$ ps ax | grep 'processname' | grep 'grep' -v | awk '{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 alice

showing 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 root

and 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`

References

pgrep(1) – Solaris 10 User Commands Reference Manual
pgrep(1): look up processes based on name and other attributes – Linux User Commands Manual

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more nl paste printf sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs yes

Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal expr lp od sleep true and false

List of Unix utilities

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pgrep

Example usage

See also

References