Information about Pgrep

pgrep is a command line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system. It has since been reimplemented for Linux and OpenBSD. It searches for all the named processes, that can be specified as extended regular expression patterns, and, by default, returns their ID. Alternatives include pidof and ps.

Example usage

pgrep's default behaviour (returning the process id(s) of the named task(s)) is invoked by typing:

pgrep taskname

This is roughly equivalent to the following command:

ps ax | grep taskname | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'

Hence, pgrep simplifies an otherwise complex task. pgrep also has additional functionality, e.g.:

• Show all processes (in long form, ID and name) belonging to the other group:

:pgrep -l -G other

• Show all process not belonging to root user:

:pgrep -v -u root

See also

• List of Unix programs
• pkill - signal processes based on name and other attributes
• ps - display the currently running processes
• grep - search for lines of text that match one or many regular expressions

External links

• pgrep(1): look up processes based on name and other attributes – Linux man page on usr-share-man.org

•  • [ e] Unix command line programs and builtins (more)
File and file system management	cat chattr cd chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp du df file fsck fuser ln ls lsof mkdir mount mv pwd rm rmdir split touch
Process management	at chroot crontab exit kill killall nice pgrep pidof pkill ps sleep time top wait watch
User Management/Environment	env finger id logname mesg passwd su sudo uname uptime w wall who whoami write
Text processing	awk comm cut ed ex fmt head iconv join less more paste sed sort tac tail tr uniq wc xargs
Shell programming	basename echo expr false printf test true unset
Printing: lp Communications: inetd netstat ping rlogin nc traceroute Searching: find grep strings Miscellaneous: banner bc cal dd man size yes