Joe Zeff wrote: > On 7/18/26 12:44 PM, Bob Marčan via users wrote: >> Is this a competition in using a command alias or solving >> a problem with a clear, all-understandable command? > > In my case, it's an easy way to find a program's PID, if > you want to look at it or kill it. The reason for the > second grep is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'd argue that pgrep is a better way to solve that task. With -af it outputs the PID and full command line, similar to what you'd get from ps aux. It has options to limit the matches based on numerous other criteria, e.g.: user, group, run state, etc.). It's also handy because you can largely just run it again switching pgrep to pkill to kill the command (removing the -a option, which is only relevant to pgrep). More generally for grep tasks where you don't want to match grep (process output and shell history are two common places where that's often the case), you can avoid the second pipe to grep by using something like 'grep [f]oo' (that is placing a single character in the string in a bracket expression). Not that most people need to care about an additional process (and if they do, using shell at all isn't going to be ideal), but it is good to know. It saves a little typing and makes scripts and command lines ever-so-slightly easier to read. Other than muscle memory for those who learned long before pgrep was common, 'ps … | grep … | grep -v grep' is not the ideal way to solve this problem anymore. :) -- Todd
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