Better coverage of pidof, pgrep, pkill, ps aux

jlevy / the-art-of-command-line

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Better coverage of pidof, pgrep, pkill, ps aux | grep ... #475

Open jlevy opened 7 years ago

jlevy commented 7 years ago

Following on to #462... We may want something like this:

To look up a process by name, use pidof (for exact matching) or pgrep. Use pgrep -f to search for processes and match the entire command line. (Combinations like ps aux | grep ... and similar can also be used for searching for processes interactively, but can have many corner-case failures and should be avoided for scripting.) Use pkill to kill processes by name.

Thoughts/elaborations?

sakshamsharma commented 7 years ago

I personally keep an alias:

alias proc='ps -e | grep'

I find this rather very convenient. Also, pkill being pattern kill, it is important to note that it may sometimes do unwanted things. A pkill iref would kill firefox for instance. This ought to be mentioned.