Oct

23

*nix command of the day

Filed Under technical 

I’m taking a few days of training this week for a specific suite of products. During class today I learned about a really simple command: pgrep. It lets you grep through running processes based on numerous attributes. For years I’ve always done something like ps auxww | grep foo when all I really needed was pgrep foo. Why didn’t anyone ever enlighten me? Think of how many fewer characters I could have typed in my lifetime …

No, it’s not earth-shattering, and it’s not like I was using cat file.txt | wc -l rather than wc -l file.txt. (Now that would be embarrassing.) Still, it’s refreshing every now and then to learn simpler ways to do things.

Comments

3 Responses to “*nix command of the day”

  1. Topher on October 24th, 2006 8:47 am

    You’re the one that taught me ps auxww | grep foo, and now you’ve taught me the replacement.

    I don’t know if I ever realized how significant you were in my computing life. You essentially taught me how to use Linux and vim.

    Thanks man.

  2. jay on October 24th, 2006 10:35 am

    pgrep is quite nifty. If you use -fl you get a nice long format.

    Along the same lines are you familiar with pkill? This would, for example, allow you to do a pkill syslog instead of doing something like pgrep syslog & kill $PID or a kill `pgrep syslog`

    When I’m feeling particularly verbose I will do a cat file.txt | wc -l, but I do know better. :-)

  3. bcp on October 24th, 2006 5:39 pm

    Topherone, I’m glad I still have the opportunity to “clarify” things I’ve passed along in the past under the guise of being helpful. :-P It warms my heart to know I helped steer someone away from nastiness and toward a true text editor. (I don’t have anything against emacs. It’s just fun to taunt people.) Seriously, though, thanks for the comments, Topher.

    And Jay, I did find pkill moments after pgrep, as the man page for pgrep referenced it. I then went out to find what other p* commands I might not know about. The most interesting one was pinky, a lightweight version of finger. Not particularly useful, but it amused me.

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