CentOS Quick Start Guide

The ps command with grep

Practically, it is difficult to remember the exact name of processes running on a Linux system. In scenarios where you do not remember the exact name of a process, the pidof command will not return the PID in the output. In such cases, the ps command output can be given as input to the grep filter to find the desired process name, as shown in the following command line:

$ ps aux | grep <process_name>$ ps aux | grep sshd

The second column of output contains the PID of the filtered process.