How to list processes or services that begin with a specific letter

student23 · 01-20-2012, 01:04 AM

Hello everyone,

I would like to list all processes or services that start with the letter s. I have tried running the command service --status-all | grep s* and also the ps command with the same syntax but no success. Thank you in advance for your responses.

Telengard · 01-20-2012, 01:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by student23

service --status-all | grep s*

* is a globbing character. Because you did not protect it from the shell by quoting it appropriately, the shell expands it. The pattern s* will be expanded into the list of files in the current working directory who's names begin with s.

grep processes regular expressions. Your regular expression, had you quoted it to protect it from the shell, would match every line with zero or more instances of the character s. In other words, every line.

HTH

student23 · 01-20-2012, 02:34 AM

I'm making an effort on trying to understand what you said by reading the information on the links but I'm not grasping it. Thank your for your response.

barunparichha · 01-20-2012, 02:45 AM

Try them :

Code:

ps -eaf | grep ^s


or


service --status-all | grep ^s

rainbowsally · 01-20-2012, 03:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by student23

Hello everyone,

I would like to list all processes or services that start with the letter s. I have tried running the command service --status-all | grep s* and also the ps command with the same syntax but no success. Thank you in advance for your responses.

Also try 'pgrep <substring>'

You can further limit the output with 'pgrep <substring> -u <user>' also.

This will give you a list of pids which you can use to look up app names (using readlink) in /proc/<pid>/exe links.

These 'exe' links always return the actual running file with the full path.

So there are several options here.

Great question! And great answers!