Hi everybody,

I am looking to do the following: give a command line starting with ps aux that will print only entries with square brackets around the command field. I need to use a pipe after ps aux and keep in mind that the COMMAND field comes last in the output.

I believe I need to create a way to list files that are in brackets only. I've been able to create a command to exlclude files in brackets by typing the following:

grep -v ]

But I need to know how to create the opposite effect, and list only the files in brackets. Can anybody help?

Sorry for being such a beginner, but this problem has got me stumped.


Thanks!

try this, you might have to change the # value in the awk command, but this should get you started:

ps -aux = what you expect

grep -v grep = the -v excludes what is after the -v, in this case it will not display itself in the search

awk '{print $11}' = this will print ONLY the 11th field of the ps -aux

grep -e ] = this will look for ONLY matching the ] in the search.

hope that helps.

1 members found this post helpful.

now that is a much cleaner way of handling the search unSpawn. im learning. that is more to what i was wanting to do, but could not figure it out fast enough.

Then you might like David the H.'s advice and pointers here.

1 members found this post helpful.

thank you everybody! This accomplished exactly what I was looking to do.

I was looking for that

the right answer to this is ps aux|grep -e ]$

No it is not....

The OP wants the commands only, not all the other output:Both answers given by lleb and unSpawn are not fully correct either; They only print field 11 and there can be more (see the above example).

Have a look at this:

I have to chime in, because grepping through the process list -- i do this often.

How about:

If you find yourself using 'ps|grep something|grep -v grep' a lot then know there's pgrep.


You're right.

*BTW if the objective would have been to find kernel threads then they're children of kthread (2.6) or kthreadd (3.x) which could be expressed as 'pgrep kthread; pgrep -P $(pgrep kthread)'. For user land processes pgrep works as well: 'pgrep -f "\[";'.

if you work as an admin you need to resolve things quickly. that means you need to find a short way, less type and resolve things faster.

so I would stick with: ps aux|grep -e ]$