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Comment by smcdow | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? People still do this?

  ps -ef | grep foo | grep -v grep

This always works:

  ps -ef | grep '[f]oo'

And, if you're running a modern operating system:

  pgrep foo

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I use both, but 'grep -v grep' is far easier to type.

And I almost always want the full ps output, or I'm searching for a commandline argument rather than the process name, so pgrep is out.

  function psg () { [[ -z "$1" ]] && return ; local _first=${1:0:1} ; local _rest=${1:1} ; [[ -z "$_rest" ]] && _rest='[^]]' ; local _com="ps -ef | grep '[$_first]'$_rest" ; eval "$_com" }

Wow, that's certainly one way to do it. I'm still not seeing an issue with 'grep -v grep'.

Drop it in your .bashrc and just type "psg foo"

  ps -ef | grep foo | grep -v grep

Will fail if foo="grep"

My take: https://gist.github.com/936362

Check out pgrep -f

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