What is the best way/command to get pid of process by process name?

I tried pgrep , ps -ef | grep procname, pidof but i don't think these are robust.
Sometimes i got more than one pid.

Logic says you have to expect that, when you have more than one process with the same name. The solution is to kill the specific process you want by pid, not by process name.

Hi,
Some programs fork multiple processes and therefore will appear multiple time with different pids. For what programs are you seeing this?

Evo2.

Does killall do what you want?

i don't want to kill the process, i only want pid of process using process name.

for me pgrep works. as it was mentioned an app can be started several times, therefore sometimes pgrep returns more pids. The most trivial example is the bash. If you want to check a specific instance you need to store its pid (when it was started).

I am seeing this for customized applications.

Hi,
Are there multiple instances running? Do they fork?

Evo2.

ps -ef | grep app | grep -v grep |awk '{print $2}'

gives two pids.

ps -ef | grep app gives lot of lines (output). i want to minimize the output andi guess its forking.

Hi,
If there are two processes with the name "app" then that is what you should expect.
Minimize? To what aim?
If the program forks, it forks... I really don't understand what you are trying to do. Perhaps we could be of more help if you give us the bigger picture.

Evo2.

That is exactly the same as pgrep app.
What do you mean by "customized applications"? What is the problem with those pids? Why do you need them?

In my world:Always finds the grep as well as any existing process names matching the search string. The grep process also matches the search string. I would not use the -f flag in that command. Perhaps you're looking for multiple users running that process though.

This will only print the parent process(es) if it (or they) forked.

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I'm not clear on exactly what your goal is here. Do you just want to identify a specific process so you can kill it? If so, that is easily done manually using commands that have been discussed here. Are you trying to write a foolproof script that will do automated kills without human interaction? You have to be a bit more careful doing that, although if you are running as a standard userid and not root, you've already got some protections built in due to permissions. Are you trying to snipe off and kill only certain spawned process of a master process, leaving the master and other siblings intact? You said you want to "minimize the output". That alone doesn't make any sense. Why do you want to minimize it? What do you want included and what do you want excluded from the output?

If you tell us exactly what you are trying to accomplish, I think you will get some good advice and help here.