Greater grokking of pgrep
Process Finder
Pgrep is a valuable tool for tracking down processes.
Grep has become the standard name for any search tool that uses regular expressions. Whether you are talking about egrep, fgrep, cgrep, or both tre-agrep and Wu-Manber agrep, commands with names that contain "grep" make their basic functionality perfectly clear. So, naturally, when a command for finding processes was written, could it be called anything except pgrep [1]?
Pgrep has become a useful command because of the proliferation of processes in computing. Defined as an instance of a running program, a process (or task) can range from an essential program for the running of the operating system – traditionally called a daemon and owned by the root user – to a productivity application started by an ordinary user.
Just running the top command, which lists the processes that use the most system resources, regularly returns a list of 40 or 50 processes. Run pstree, which shows both parent and child processes, and the result is several screens full of information and more than 240 processes (Figure 1). The number of processes displayed can be reduced by running ps auS to show only currently active processes (Figure 2) or fuser to show the processes using a particular file or filesystem. But, if you have some idea of the name of the process you are looking for, pgrep can often be the most useful command for locating it.
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