how to count the number of occurrences of a process

beeblequix · 09-18-2006, 02:41 PM

I WAS going to ask how to do this but since I figured it out I present it to fellow n00bs(and myself in case I forget).

I wanted to know how many occurrences of a process that I have running--

command: ps -aux|grep 'some_process'|wc -l
explanation: 1)take the current listing of all processes in BSD format 2)search for all lines containing 'some_process' 3)then count how many lines 'some_process' occurs on.

Is there a better way to do this?

acid_kewpie · 09-18-2006, 02:42 PM

Code:

pidof <process name> | wc -w

marozsas · 09-18-2006, 03:31 PM

variations about this theme....

Code:

$ pgrep <process_name> | wc -l

haertig · 09-18-2006, 04:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by beeblequix

ps -aux|grep 'some_process'|wc -l

This method can come up with a count that's one too hig (intermittantly). You will sometimes catch your "grep" in the count to!

I know I'm only running one copy of "init", but see below where my count would have been two by your method:

Code:

$ ps aux | grep init
root         1  0.0  0.0  1600  536 ?        S    Sep14   0:02 init [2]
haertig  22987  0.0  0.0  1928  600 pts/0    R+   15:13   0:00 grep init
$